


Saorsa, Arc I

by scapegrace74



Series: Saorsa [1]
Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1940s, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Showverse AU, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:53:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 37
Words: 39,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23687983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scapegrace74/pseuds/scapegrace74
Summary: A novel that re-imagines Outlander while trying to answer the question - what might have happened if it was Jamie who went through the stones to meet Claire in the 1940s?  The sub-title should probably be: Outlander Run Through the Blender.
Relationships: Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser
Series: Saorsa [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1882939
Comments: 269
Kudos: 269





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first story in a two-story arc, with two possible endings. Pay attention to the chapter notes to decide where you want this first arc to end.  
> I am new to the Outlander fandom, and have never read the books, so by necessity this story is based on Outlander as depicted in the TV series.  
> This isn't a particularly original notion for an AU, so I imagine other authors have written from a similar premise before. If that's the case, any similarities are purely happenstance and I apologize for rehashing old ideas.  
> Where I've used Gaelic dialogue, it's been translated from English via Google Translator. Rather than break up the flow of the text, all but the Gaelic expressions commonly used in the fandom will be translated in the chapter endnotes. Except this one: Saorsa means redemption, or freedom.  
> Oh, and I'm Canadian and French-speaking to boot, which means that this fic was brought to you by the letters "u" and "z (pronounced zed)", and that I've never met an embedded clause that I didn't love.

The furious silence of battle was upon him. All around men screamed, bawled, their swords groaning in metal complaint, but the tumult did not reach his ears. His heart felt enormous, swollen to fill his entire chest with rage and bloodlust, pumping so violently his breastbone ached. 

The morning sun was a watery orb hidden behind thick grey fog that hung over the moor like peat smoke. A family of black grouse startled from beneath a thicket and rose in a confusion of wings, but the fighting rushed on without a pause.

One Redcoat after another spilled into his line of sight like water down a flume. He hacked and stabbed with his sword and dirk until the way forward was clear again. If he stepped over their broken bodies or ground his muddy boots into their sundered limbs, he was unaware. There would be a moment, maybe two, when his vision would clear and the scent of death would reach him before another opponent appeared.

The early spring grasses grew slick with blood and gore, making each step a struggle. His arms felt heavy as iron, but still he pressed forward into the fray. His fellow clansmen lay in heaps across the moor, dead or dying. If the Jacobite cause was to perish at Culloden Moor, he would be certain it did so at maximum expense to the English.

Through some combination of skill and dumb luck, he’d yet to be seriously injured, although blood from a gash near his hair stung his left eye. He had no idea how long he’d been fighting. It felt like years, but the sun had barely lifted from the horizon. His tongue was thick with thirst and he paused, swordpoint planted in the boggy ground, to take the measure of his surroundings and swig a massive draught of whisky from his leather flask. 

The din of combat sounded far off, like a rockslide on a distant mountain or a rumour from underground. Mist combed prettily through the heather and he felt a flood of love for his country wash over him like cold air. He would gladly give his last breath to defend this land from the English. If the Scottish way of life were to perish, there was no place left in the world where his soul could bide.

An English soldier attacked from his left without warning. His reflexes, honed through countless skirmishes and lesser battles, caused him to raise his forearm to meet the descending blow. The force of collision jolted up his left arm, freezing his nerves. He drew a deep breath through his nostrils, tasting the tang of iron and rot, and dislodged his sword from the earth. The Englishman was on him again, several inches shorter but wiry and driven by the mad frenzy of a morning’s worth of bloodshed. The flat of his sword made contact with the officer’s ribs and he thrust upward, trying to slice through his arm. The Scot threw himself forward, his left arm dangling uselessly. His heel caught on a clod of dirt and both men fell to the ground, caught in a murderous embrace. They rolled and heaved, each seeking enough space to land a killing blow. He dropped his broad sword, useless in close confines, and reached for his _sgain dubh_ , hidden in the folds of his plaid. Thrusting upward and sideways into the Englishman’s gut, he felt a rush of heat flow over his fingers, loosening his grip on the thin knife. The officer grunted and reared backward, staring down at his stomach in awe. Their eyes met and held, strangely intimate and peaceful as the day dimmed to blackness around them. 

His last thought before succumbing to the onrushing shadow was that he had no idea which blow had killed him.


	2. Chapter 2

The running of an estate such as Lallybroch was a never-ending series of menial tasks. From sun-up to sundown, Claire was expected to make countless decisions, each more alien than the last. Were the pair of Clydesdales that drew the plow to be shod next week? Was the late summer harvest to be threshed by hand, or sent to a neighbouring farmer who owned a thresher, in exchange for a tenth of the resulting grain? Who would see to the kitchen when Cook attended her uncle’s funeral in Aberdeen? Would she write a letter to the local council asking for an extension to the traditional season for the stag hunt on common lands, to compensate for the meagre war rations?

It had sounded immensely romantic, when she and Frank first met. An ancestral farm deep in the Scottish Highlands, handed down through generations of Randalls since the eighteenth century. Frank spoke with fondness of its timeworn buildings, quaint occupants and how its isolation made it feel like a portal to a long-ago way of life. She distracted herself with images of its craggy majesty while she hunkered in a Tube station, the air raid sirens wailing above. 

She could scarcely believe her good fortune when, one October afternoon in 1941 while on furlough from officer’s training, Frank proposed. Her nearest relatives were all dead, and Frank’s mother lived with her sister in Dorset, so they settled for a simple ceremony at the Registrar’s office in Paddington before spending a blissful weekend abed in a cottage near Oxford, on loan from a university chum of Frank’s.

She still remembered their conversation, her riot of dark brown curls resting on her new husband’s pale shoulder.

“I want you to leave London, while travel is still possible,” Frank said, his fingers tracing the knobs of her spine.

“Whatever for? I’m almost finished my nurses’ training, and then they’ll send me to the front.” She pivoted to look into his eyes. They were dark brown, and usually placid like a friendly hound.

“It’s not safe, Claire. You need to go north, to Lallybroch. I’ll rest easier knowing that you’re away from danger, far from the bombing. I’ll visit you there, whenever I’m on leave. You can always finish your schooling once the war is over, if it still interests you.” There was a finality to this pronouncement that reminded her that she barely knew this man to whom her life was now indelibly bound.

And that was how she came to be the lady of an estate she’d never laid eyes upon until the chill winter’s afternoon when she first walked into the courtyard and gazed up at its thick grey walls, spare windows staring at her like suspicious eyes. 

Eight months later, and she was still hopelessly adrift. Most of the staff had worked for the family for decades and were self-sufficient and capable. Still, as the Lady of Lallybroch she was expected to have an opinion on everything, and to provide guidance in her husband’s absence.

Which did nothing to explain why she was still abed, long after the cocks in the stable yard were done crowing and breakfast served to the day labourers in the great hall. She could hear the bustle of activity far below the window she kept open to capture the cool night air, yet she tarried in the immense four poster bed, hidden from the world behind thick, moth-eaten damask curtains.

If she had her way, she would never leave this room again.


	3. Chapter 3

He awoke to the familiar stench of barnyard offal and the sea-like jolting of a wooden cart. His wrists were bound tightly. After painful effort he found his ankles were manacled as well. It was night, and he could hear flat English voices in the dark nearby. A prisoner, then.

It was difficult forcing his cloudy mind to focus, but it was essential. Being taken prisoner by the English was a thousand times worse than dying in battle. He knew enough of their brutality towards the Scots to grasp the ordeal that awaited him. As a captured Jacobite, he would be tortured until he yielded information about his fellow rebels or died in the undertaking. If he’d had a blade, he might have cut his own throat to spare himself the pain, were it not a mortal sin.

Consciousness fled and when it returned, he was being lifted roughly from the wagon by three Redcoats. His left shoulder seared with pain and fairy lights danced before his eyes, but he managed to balance shakily upright. The low doorway of a drover’s hut forced him to bend nearly double. When he was able to regain his full height, it took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dim glow cast by the fire inside the rough shelter. Once they did, he knew he was truly damned.

If his captors had been mere infantrymen, he stood a chance of resisting interrogation and possibly of escape. But sitting before the hearth, leather-booted feet extended towards the flames, was a man whose insignia identified him as a captain of dragoons. He was shoved roughly in that direction, and it was only through tight mastery of his person that he avoided crying out in pain. Instead he stood erect and defiant in his plaid and ruined linen sark, allowing the officer to take his measure. Icy blue eyes met deep brown without wavering.

“To whom do I have the honour of addressing myself,” the captain finally said in derisive, crisp tones.

“James Alexander Malcolm of Poltalloch,” he answered swiftly, hoping the man had no knowledge of clan tartans.

“Jonathan Randall, Captain of His Majesty’s army, Eleventh Regiment, Lord Kerr’s Dragoons, at your service.” The man rose and made a mocking bow in his direction. He was tall, but still a good hand shorter than the Scot. He bore himself with the same haughty uprightness of every English officer. There was a gleam of intelligence to his dark eyes and a shadow of viciousness in the hard set of his lips. All in all, the very last man he wanted to meet in his current predicament. He tried to steel himself for the coming trial.

His father, dead these three years, spoke to him then.

“A man who does not know fear is a fool, _mo mhac_. The truest measure of a man is that he meets his fear head on and does not flinch. Dutifully. Honourably. _Tha toil Dhè air a dhèanamh_.”

Instead of immediate questioning or brutality, he was offered a stool near the hearth and a ladle of fresh water. With the pitch of battle and the confusion of capture fading from his nerves, he was dry-mouthed with thirst. It had been two days since he had slept for more than a moment, and his whole body shook with the effort of sitting upright. The captain’s lips were moving, but all he could hear was a distant hum, like a far-off hive of bees. Then everything went black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mo mhac - my son
> 
> Tha toil Dhè air a dhèanamh - God's will be done


	4. Chapter 4

A persistent knocking woke her from a strange dream of walking across an icy lake and being able to see clear through to the bottom, where oddly formed creatures dwelled.

“Milady,” a voice compelled in a Scottish accent.

She groaned and pulled the woolen covers far over her head.

“Milady!” the voice insisted from just inside the door. It was Mrs. Fitz, the housekeeper. “Pardon, milady, but ye are needed downstairs at once.”

Her plan to hide in bed indefinitely thwarted, she rose and made her way to her dressing table. Catching sight of herself in its antique mirror, she grimaced. Red-rimmed eyes, blotchy pale skin and a riotous mess of curls: her appearance bore witness to the disconsolate night she had just passed.

“I’m on my way, Mrs. Fitz,” she called, schooling her voice to keep steady. “I just need a moment to freshen up.”

At the bottom of the stairs, she was met by the housekeeper, a stable hand named Rupert, and Murtagh Fitzgibbons, each wearing their version of a worried frown. Murtagh oversaw the estate’s considerable property and rarely came into the castle proper without a formal invitation, so there was plenty of evidence that something was gravely wrong.

“Well, I’m here. What is it that I’m needed for?”

Murtagh removed his tam and ran a weathered hand through his fulsome dark beard. If she had to venture a guess, she would place him around fifty years, but he had an ageless quality about him, heightened by the thick burr he lay over his antiquated manner of speaking. She remembered Frank saying that he came from the Outer Isles and had been in the service of the family since he had served under Frank’s father during the Great War.

“Pardon the interruption, milady,” Murtagh began, “but ‘tis a matter in the stable that requires yer attention.”

“In the stable?” she questioned, confused.

“Aye. The youn’ heifer is nearin’ her time tae calve, but she’s in distress, ye ken?”

She shook her head, still stymied by this strange conversation, arriving as it did on the heels of yesterday’s news and last night’s sleeplessness.

“Yer a midwife, are ye no’, milady?”

“Actually, no. I’m trained as a nurse, but I’ve never practiced obstetrics.”

Murtagh made a guttural dismissive noise, as though she was arguing semantics.

“Ye ken what to do, do ye no’?”

“Not for a cow!” she exclaimed.

“Tis no’ sae different as ye may think,” Murtagh declared.

And that was how she found herself kneeling on a bed of fresh straw and performing a pelvic exam on a large, sweaty ungulate.

“The calf is breach,” she concluded, wiping her hand against the kitchen apron Mrs. Fitz had hastily procured before she left the main house.

“Aye, ‘tis as I feared. Tis her first, ye ken, and first babes are always the most vexsome.” Murtagh ran a hand gently over the cow’s molten brown eye, wide with fear, and murmured something soothing in Gaelic. Despite her underlying misery, Claire smiled at the sight. He was a gruff man, but he clearly cared deeply for those under his charge. The estate was lucky to have him.

“We’ll have to reposition the calf so that it can be born front legs first. I will work from… inside, and you will need to press hard against her flank. It won’t be easy, and we may lose both mother and offspring in the attempt, but that is the inevitable conclusion if we do nothing at all.” Even as she spoke, she began washing her hands vigorously in the pail of cool clean water the stable boy had drawn from the well.

“T’would be a great tragedy if she were tae die.”

“Surely we have other heifers.”

“Aye, but I made it sae this one was covered late, sae her _we’un_ would be born at the harvest. The other _laogh_ are all weaned by now.”

“I don’t…”

“If she dies, the farm will no’ have milk nor cheese this winter.”

She set her mouth in a familiar, determined line. 

“Then we better make certain she doesn’t die,” she vowed as she rolled up her sleeve.

Her whole life may be upside down, but these people and this estate still needed her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> laogh - calfs


	5. Chapter 5

As Jamie struggled back to consciousness, he was aware of a wringing pain in his left shoulder and an icy chill pressing against his torso. His arms were spread wide, rough bonds chafing his wrists, like Christ on the cross. He prayed briefly for similar equanimity in the face of suffering. His gluey eyes pulled open and he saw through the watery light of dawn that he was standing in an out-building, trussed to the rafters and stripped to the waist. A coating of frost covered the tops of the hewn firewood stacked before him. He shifted his weight, trying to find relief against the bright sparks of pain that shot along his arm.

“My god, you are a magnificent creature,” Captain Randall murmured behind him. “If all the Scots looked like you, we might not have routed you on Culloden Moor.”

Woozy and frantic as he was, he grabbed hold of that piece of information. The Jacobites had been beaten, and badly. He’d suspected as much, but knowing it to be true allowed a change to his strategy.

The English would be seeking information about the leaders of the Rising. As a royal descendent Charles Stuart was immune from imprisonment or torture. If captured, the worst he would suffer was exile. But a Scottish rebel leader, no matter what his titles, would make an excellent substitute on which to direct the wrath of the English Crown for the impudence of the Catholic rebellion. Unfortunately, as a lesser laird Jamie knew every rebel leader by name, by clan and by kith and kin.

His original plan had been to remain silent and pray for a swift death, hastening it by any means within his power. Now, a tempting alternative presented itself. He had no wish to die. He was only twenty-two and held to the future with the tenacious ferocity particular to youth. If he named only those rebels who had died in battle, he could perhaps satisfy the English captain without bringing further harm to his fellow Jacobites.

“It will be a shame to mar such an exquisite body.” Randall’s finger trailed down the furrow next to his spine. A dark thought arose in Jamie’s mind. Perhaps there was another means of satisfying the captain. One that spared the lash, but not his soul.

“If I had any artistic talent, I would sketch you. Or better yet, sculpt you. To have something to remember you by, from before.”

“ _Fhalbh 's tarraing_ ,” he spat out, repulsed by Randall’s foul breath against his neck.

“Now, that didn’t sound very nice, Mr. Malcolm. I take it you’re not a connoisseur of the arts. Pity.”

Without warning save a sharp crack, stiff leather met the supple skin of his back. The pain was so sudden he failed to cry out, biting down on his tongue instead as saliva and blood flooded his mouth.

“Now that I have your attention, let me explain to you how this is done,” the captain spoke calmly. “I will administer two hundred such lashes. When I am done, if you are still alive, you will be untethered. Tomorrow, we begin anew.” A hand ghosted across his buttocks, forcing a shudder to summit his spine.

“There are two means of obtaining clemency. First, for each name of a Jacobite leader you provide, I will spare you ten lashes. I doubt there are twenty such men, so either way, you bleed.” Randall paused, to let that thought sink in. “Alternatively, I will untie you right now, and spare you any further disfigurement. I will still need to turn you over to the courts, and doubtless you will hang, but that is a swift and merciful end compared to what I have in store for you. All you need do is afford me the pleasure of your body for the night.”

Jamie was sorely tempted. He’d never been buggered, but he was certain it would hurt less than two hundred lashes laid down by a vengeful Redcoat. The bright sting of a single blow still shimmered across his back. Then he thought of his father’s exhortation, and the brave militiamen he had recruited to the Jacobite cause. They had not been given the opportunity to spare their lives and had rushed into the fray regardless. To do otherwise would be dishonourable.

“I reckon ye should get started then, for yer arm is bound to tire ‘ere long,” he growled.

The second stroke hit just above the first, spreading blistering heat and icy pinpricks all at once. His body seized, but he did not scream. Instead he sent his mind far away, to Lallybroch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fhalbh 's tarraing - Go to Hell


	6. Chapter 6

The radio murmured peacefully in the background as Claire sat in front of the enormous open fireplace, large enough to roast a stag inside. A merry fire popped and hissed, chasing away the damp of the afternoon’s storm.

There were things she should be doing. Mending the frayed tablecloth or composing a list for Saturday’s market in the village. Trying once again to make sense of the medieval ledger book or disinfecting her medical supplies, which she’d used earlier to remove a particularly vicious splinter from under the thumbnail of Cook’s oldest son. Instead she stared into the flames, allowing their undulating dance to mesmerize her into thoughtlessness.

Mrs. Fitz bustled into the room, interrupting her rare moment of peace.

“Cook is wondering wha’ she ought tae serve t’morra for yer lunch wi’ the Duke o’ Sandringham, milady” she launched in without preamble.

“Is that tomorrow? I’d completely forgotten.”

“Aye, and as ‘tis a Friday, she has her mind on a baked perch, perhaps wi’ some morels and wild garlic?”

“Yes, of course. Whatever Cook thinks is best,” Claire responded, distracted by the re-occurrence of a persistent headache.

“Weel, we’d be needin’ tae send one o’ the stable lads tae the lochan in the morn’, if ‘tis alright wi’ ye, milady.”

“Perfectly alright. And please, Mrs. Fitz, call me Claire. Or at least Mrs. Randall. You know I don’t have much time for this “my lady” nonsense,” she explained for what must be the hundredth time.

“As ye say, milady,” the housekeeper replied, as always. She curtsied and left Claire to her solitude once again.

Her mind wandered to the Duke’s seasonal visit. Through feudal intricacies that Frank had never fully explained, the Duke held some form of administrative guardianship over Lallybroch, though the estate belonged to the Randall family. Twice every year the Duke visited his Scottish fiefdom, performed a cursory inspection of the property and received a customary fee of one hundred pounds for his trouble. Having entertained him in the spring, Claire saw these visits as a mere pretext by the Duke to eat a series of fine meals and to amass local gossip. As the senior civilian representative of the Home Guard for all of Scotland and Northern England, there was hardly anyone in the county with whom the Duke was not acquainted. If nothing else, he was a good man to know and, she suspected, a poor one to cross.


	7. Chapter 7

He had known pain, in his short but brutal life. In his experience, it was useless to try to hide from its iron embrace. Instead he collapsed willingly into its arms. Strange visions came to him, fever dreams from the world beyond the veil. His mother, straw basket of herbs resting against her hip, calling him in from the fields at Lallybroch. His father, glancing over his shoulder on horseback with the familiar gleam of pride in his eyes. And people and places he did not recognize but felt familiar all the same.

At some point during the night, he broke through the surface of awareness and tried to roll further onto his side to spare his flayed back. Every motion was torment and he would have vomited, had there been fluids in his body left to purge. Thus, it took a long while for him to realize that the sharp bite in his thigh muscle was something other than the coarse straw on which he lay. 

His hand crept downward, every inch of movement ripping his skin anew. Fairy lights danced behind his eyelids and he stopped often to master his laboured breath. The soldiers Randall posted to guard him were silent and likely dozing in the blank hush of darkest night, but he did not care to rouse their attention. Randall himself had ridden off after the flogging was over, with a promise to return in the morning.

It was this thought that drove him forward until eventually his fingers met with a metal object, buried in the folds of the plaid still wrapped about his hips. His kilt pin, unclasped and stabbing his leg. He had been relieved of every potential weapon, but somehow they had forgotten his kilt pin.

He struggled to focus his meandering mind. How might he use this tiny instrument? His first coherent thought was to kill Captain Randall when he returned. But there were many impediments, not least of all his weakened state and bound limbs. Plus, the likelihood of landing a fatal blow with so small a weapon was minute.

Next, he considered hastening his own death. He knew he would never survive a second flogging, so ending things beforehand would simply quicken his journey to the hereafter. He could not manage to overcome the fundamental dilemma that suicide was a mortal sin, however. If he was to meet his loved ones again in heaven, his death could not be self-inflicted.

Exhausted by his mental and physical effort, he began to sink below the waters of his pain when a final idea arose unbidden. He could use the pin to try to escape. Success was wildly improbable, but if he failed, he would likely be killed in the attempt, sparing a second flogging without bartering his soul. Even as he grasped hold of this scheme, his fingers manipulated the pin free of his kilt and began the slow, tortuous path towards the irons that circled his ankles.

The eerie light before dawn was just beginning to glow through the hut’s single parchment window when the irons finally fell from his legs. Sweat was pouring from his brow and stinging his eyes. His fingers were numb with cold, but he felt a surge of hope in his veins. His guards had not stirred, but he could not chance alerting them. Slowly, he rolled to his hands and knees, teeth gripping his tongue to avoid crying out. Crawling like a babe, he stayed in the shadows and made his halting way towards freedom. 

Next to the door, a familiar object hung from a peg high on the wall: his sporran. He used the rough timber frame and iron latch to drag his battered body upright. The latch released with a loud snick and the door swung outwards, allowing a gust of night air to swirl into the hut. The fire guttered. Without pausing to look back at his guards, he grabbed the belt of his sporran between his bound hands and stumbled forward out the door and into the eerie blue light. 

Every second he expected to hear English voices raised in alarm, or to feel the blast of gun fire rend his flesh. Neither occurred. He peered into the night, hoping to see tethered horses, but there were none nearby. He stood no chance of outrunning his captors on foot, especially when he could barely stand, but he charged forward anyway, the sweet air of freedom filling his lungs. Rather than follow the rutted cart path, he fled into the nearby wood, blindly lurching uphill, falling to his knees, standing again, all while twigs and brambles scored his raw back and blood ran freely down his legs.

As the sun rose, he knew he could go no further. He was barely a mile from the hut when he collapsed near the top of a bald hill, shivering in spasms. There was no strength left in his body, and he knew he must die. At least it would be on his terms: free and defiant to the last. He bent his forehead to the ground and kissed the dewy earth. Many had fallen fighting for Scotland, and he counted himself blessed to be in their number.

As he rested his head, a strange humming reached his ears, like a giant hive of bees buried underground. It seemed to come from the ring of standing stones that capped the hill, just a few short yards from where he lay. Weary to the marrow, he still lifted his head to gaze at them, wondering what rite the Old Ones had performed on this very spot. As he did so, the sun broke the horizon and shone its piercing light directly upon the centre stone. This was where the humming sound was originating, he was certain of it.

Pulling himself forward across the ground, he felt drawn towards the menhir, as though it was calling only for him. The hum grew louder, until it shook his very bones. Directly before the stone, he lifted his bloodshot eyes to heaven, raised his gnarled hands to its cold, granite surface, and simply disappeared.


	8. Chapter 8

“This is really a most excellent bread pudding, my dear,” the Duke of Sandringham intoned, washing down said pudding with another generous mouthful of port. The gentleman’s florid cheeks and rounded middle-section proved that his enjoyment of good food and drink extended beyond the walls of Lallybroch.

“Thank you, your grace. Cook is a miracle worker. She transforms liabilities into benefits, like this pudding made from stale bread. In lean times such as these, it is a priceless skill.”

Claire was wearing her best burgundy dress, bought in London before the war, and her usual cloud of curls was tamed into a bun from which only a few rebellious strands escaped. Although entertaining landed nobility was the very last thing she felt like doing, she was composed and polite, playing the role Frank had cast her in as lady of a Scottish Highland estate. If she could only get through this visit, it would be six long months before the duke returned for his spring tour. With a little luck, by then she would have some idea of what the hell she should do.

“Captain Randall is well, I trust,” the Duke interrupted her thoughts. She tried to mask her discomposure and gave the answer she had prepared for this predictable question. Not quite the truth, but not quite a lie either.

“He was very well when he visited last month whilst on leave. I’ve since received several of his letters, though of course he could not provide details of his mission. I believe he was in northern Italy of late.” She swallowed the salty knot that rose in her throat and stared at her half-eaten dessert. She hoped the duke would excuse her misty eyes as the reaction of any war bride anxious over the safety of her new husband.

“Of course,” the Duke replied in understanding. “These are difficult times, Lady Randall, but it is men such as your husband who will see us through them. I cannot tell you how much I admire him for enlisting, nor you for managing this estate so admirably in his absence. I know it cannot be easy. I only wish that others in this region would look to your excellent examples.”

“What do you mean, your grace?”

“That’s right. I forget you aren’t well-versed in local matters. Suffice it to say that many Highland Scots, having no love for the English or their political prerogatives, have not rallied eagerly to the war effort. Enrollment in my Home Guard in the Highlands is half that of the Lowland counties, and there are even rumours of clan chiefs assisting men in evading conscription.”

She found this allegation surprising. Although her time in Scotland had been brief, she could not help but be aware of the strict code of honour that governed society far more rigidly than the long strings of power that extended northward from London. With many adult men away at war, the estate was mostly served by the very young and very old, but she did not doubt any of them would lay down their life for their country. Or rather, for Scotland. And perhaps there lay the issue.

“Well, I can assure you that you have my utmost co-operation, your grace. You shan’t find a draft-dodger hiding away at Lallybroch.”

“I never doubted it, my dear. We share the same sympathies, you and I. It was why King George the First awarded captured Jacobite lands, such as this estate, to his most loyal English subjects after the last Scottish Catholic Rebellion; the Randalls among them. The Scots will never rise up against the Crown again, but they have no love for the English. A strong local bulwark is always a useful tool, is it not so?”

Not waiting for her answer to his rhetorical question, the Duke rose with a groan, brushed crumbs from his tweed sporting coat and extended his hand to clasp her own.

“And now, Lady Randall, I must unfortunately take my leave. The days are shortening, and I must reach Aberdeen by nightfall to avoid the blackout. My deepest gratitude, as ever, for your hospitality. It puts me at great ease to know that Lallybroch rests firmly in your capable hands until your husband’s return.”

He kissed her knuckles, graciously accepted the bank draft for a hundred pounds that Frank had left in his study, and after a few more pleasantries, climbed awkwardly into the back of his Humber Pullman. She waved goodbye from the courtyard as his car made its way down the long drive.

As Claire mounted the stairs to her bed chamber to change into her usual work clothes, she considered that the Duke of Sandringham must be a well-connected individual indeed, if he could afford petrol and a smartly dressed chauffeur, when everyone else struggled just to eat.


	9. Chapter 9

Donald Grant drove his team of horses at any easy trot. He wished he could go faster, as the sun was disappearing quickly behind Craig na Dunn. A religious, pragmatic man by nature, even he heeded stories of the hill and its ancient ring of magic stones. It was no place to tarry after dark. Any faster, however, and the steeply piled hay in his wagon would threaten to spill, so he hummed softly to himself and kept his eyes from straying to the slope.

Coming around a bend, the horses balked and came to a stop so sudden his knees hit the footboard. Peering into the dim, he could just make out a figure lying across the road. He jumped down and approached with caution. He could see now it was a grown man, lying face-down in the dirt. His torso was bare, and he wore nothing but a filthy plaid in the old style. What in the devil?

“Are ye alright, sir?” he asked, bending near the head of loose russet curls that fell like a curtain over a pale face.

He reached out a shaking hand in front of the man’s mouth and felt a moist exhalation. He was alive, then, although perhaps only just. He touched a bare, muscular shoulder and the young man groaned and stirred.

“Lad, I can see that ye’re ‘urt. I dinna want to move ye, but tis miles tae the village. Can ye stand?”

A stream of unintelligible words spilled out on a moan, then nothing.

Donald stood and peered into the dusk in both directions. It was a well-traveled road, but no-one was likely to be out so close to dark on account of the blackout. He’d been a strapping man in his day, but he was nearing sixty and the young man lying at his feet was easily two stone heavier and badly injured besides. He couldn’t imagine how he could lift him into the wagon. His best option was to go for help and hope the man did not die in the meantime.

He bent down close to the man’s ear. “I need tae go for help. I cannae lift ye by myself. I’ll come back for ye lad, ye can count on it. Aviemore is a few miles yonder. I’ll hie me there and be back wi’ help.”

“ _Thoir dhachaigh mi gu Lallybroch_ ,” the man uttered, lurching upwards onto his knees like a penitent at prayer.

Donald spoke no Gaelic, but he understood one word of what this strange, mangled man was saying.

“Ye came from Lallybroch, lad?”

“Aye, Lallybroch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoir dhachaigh mi gu Lallybroch - Take me home to Lallybroch


	10. Chapter 10

The blackout blinds were lowered, and artificial light given over to gas lantern and open flame. If nothing else, the Blitz was good for economizing on electricity. Claire lingered in the kitchen, washing sheets by hand in the massive stone basin while putting off going to bed, where she would doubtless toss and turn all night. The noise of quickening hoofbeats from the courtyard summoned her to the entrance hall just as someone began to pound on the enormous wooden door. Outside stood a man she did not recognize, and behind him a wagon piled high with hay hitched to two Clydesdales steaming sweat into the evening air.

“Excuse me, my lady. Tis late, but I didna ken where else to bring ‘im,” the man began, clearly agitated.

“I beg your pardon?” She wrapped her shawl more tightly around her shoulders, noticing how the nights were suddenly much cooler.

“The man, my lady. He’s in my wagon. He needs a doctor, tae be certain, but t’isn’t a doctor nearby. The only sense I can get from ‘im is Lallybroch, Lallybroch, so I brought ‘im ‘ere.”

“There’s an injured man? In your wagon?”

“Aye, my lady. I reckoned twas one of yer field ‘ands.”

Thoroughly perplexed, she grabbed a lantern from a hook near the door and descended into the courtyard. Sure enough, curled on the hay like Jesus in the manger was a man, seemingly unconscious and by the faint light thrown on his exposed back, very badly injured.

“I don’t recognize him. We need to get him inside. Whatever happened?”

“I dinna ken, my lady. I found ‘im lying in the road, at the foot of Craig na Dunn.”

She had a million other questions, but they would have to wait. Walking swiftly to the small croft next to the stables, she called loudly for Murtagh. Between Murtagh, the wagon driver, and two sleepy-eyed stable boys, they were able to roll the unconscious man onto a heavy blanket and then use it as a stretcher to bear him into the castle. Acting quickly, Claire cleared the surface of the massive dining table and instructed the group to lower the man gently onto his side. By the light of the fire, she was able to see the man’s back clearly for the first time, and what she saw made her blanche.

“Jesus and all ‘is saints in heaven,” Mrs. Fitz exclaimed from the doorway, crossing herself.

“Mrs. Fitz, please rouse Cook. I’m going to need boiling water, and a lot of it. Also, some fresh comfrey, mint or chamomile. There are clean sheets hanging before the fire in the kitchen. Please bring them to me.” Wringing her hands in agitation, Mrs. Fitz ran from the room to do her bidding.

“Murtagh, this man needs a doctor. I can tend him for now, but I need you to ride to Huntly or Keith, wherever the nearest doctor resides, and bring him back to Lallybroch at once.”

“The nearest doctor’s in Inverness, milady. On account of the war. It’d be faster tae wait fer sunup and take the laird’s motorcar tae fetch ‘im.”

Taking a deep breath, she gathered her thoughts.

“Yes, you’re right. Thank you, Murtagh. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

The older man demurred and came around the table to where the stranger lay on his side, unmoving except the faint rippling of his shallow breath.

“E’s been flogged like a stray dog, poor bastard. And that wound on ‘is shoulder is from a blade.”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it in my life,” she confessed, feeling compassion for this man flow through her like water.

“Can ye save ‘im?” Murtagh asked without judgement.

She set her shoulders and lifted her chin, brushing her hand gently through the man’s long auburn curls, tangled with sweat and dirt.

“I can. And I will.”


	11. Chapter 11

There was a sensation of floating, and then tremendous pain. From behind his eyelids, he saw the flickering of flame. Hell, then. Maybe God really was an Englishman, because by Scottish standards he was fairly pious. With that thought, he sank back into oblivion.

*

There was murmuring nearby, and a blessedly cool sensation against his back. One of the voices was English and the other Scottish, and he distinctly heard “dinna think Captain Randall would approve”. At the mention of that name, his breath seized and he tried to flee, but his limbs would not co-operate. The second voice, a woman, soothed him. “Hush. Do not be afraid. You are safe here.” Despite the fact this voice was clearly English, he believed her.

*

When he opened his eyes at last, he was in the laird’s bedchamber at Lallybroch. He lay on his left side between bed linens so fine they felt like thistle down. A candle burned near its base on the night table and its soft glow lit the face of a woman, seated in an unfamiliar chair next to the bed. Her eyes were closed, but he sensed she wasn’t sleeping. Her skin glowed like pearls in the candlelight and her dark hair framed her delicate features with billows of bonnie curls. As he was trying to puzzle out where he knew her from, her eyelids lifted, and he found himself staring into the amber eyes of some woodland creature. She did not speak and seemed equally startled to find him there, looking back at her. After a minute or two of silent communion, his lashes drooped, and he fell back to sleep.

*

His back was on fire, and flames licked up his spine towards his crown. He tried to thrash, but his limbs were bound, and every movement was torture. He cried out, senseless and afraid. Tears leaked from his eyes and met the rivulets of sweat that poured from his brow.

“It’s alright. Try not to struggle, as it’s opening your wounds. Please, you need to be still.” The voice came from the void, and he tried to heed it, but the fever burned his nerves and wiped his mind blank as a slate.

“Murtagh!” he heard the voice yell, and then urgent whispering. A pair of strong hands grabbed him by the thighs and a blade of visceral fear ran through him.

“ _Chan urrainn dhut a bhith agam!_ ” he roared in terror.

“Hush lad. Let the Sassenach tend to ye.”

“ _Feumaidh tu mo mharbhadh. Cha tionndaidh mi a-null thugaibh a-chaoidh. Bu luaithe a gheibh mi bàs!”_

“No-one will be dying today, son. _Gabh air do shocair_ ,” the male voice insisted.

“ _Innis don Chaiptean Randall gum faic mi e ann an ifrinn_!”

“What is he saying?” the female voice asked, as cool material wiped his fevered face, bringing a morsel of relief.

“I dinna ken, really. Some gibberish about nae telling anyone, an’ goin’ tae ‘ell, if ye’ll pardon my language, milady.”

“I distinctly heard him say Captain Randall. Do you think he knows my husband?”

“Aye, it appears ‘e does.”

There was a sensation of cooler air reaching his bare arse, and then a sharp sting like a bee, before the linens covered him again.

“His wounds are infected, and no wonder, considering the state he came to us in. That shot of penicillin should help.”

Minutes passed without further torment, and his rabbiting heart gradually slowed. The fire blistering his back cooled, and he began to shiver in reaction. The weight of a thin blanket spread over him. He calmed.

“Do ye need me tae stay wi’ ye, milady?”

“No, Murtagh. The worst has passed. Get some rest. And thank you. Truly.”

There was the noise of retreating footsteps, and then silence. He lay still, trying to make sense of his surroundings from within this newfound island of peace. The cool sensation was on his face again, releasing rivulets of respite along his jaw and into his hair. Despite his confusion, he knew the hand that bathed him meant him no harm, and he turned blindly towards it for comfort, like a flower turns to the sun.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chan urrainn dhut a bhith agam! - You can't have me!
> 
> Feumaidh tu mo mharbhadh. Cha tionndaidh mi a-null thugaibh a-chaoidh. Bu luaithe a gheibh mi bàs! - Kill me if you must. I will never give in to you. I would sooner die!
> 
> Gabh air do shocair - take it easy
> 
> Innis don Chaiptean Randall gum faic mi e ann an ifrinn! - Tell Captain Randall I'll see him in Hell!


	12. Chapter 12

After three straight days of caring for the red-haired stranger in her bed and dozing upright in a chair, Claire finally gave in to her need for real sleep, but not before she made Murtagh promise to stay by his side and to wake her the moment anything appeared amiss.

The urgent need for a doctor had passed, in the unlikely event Murtagh would have been able to find one willing to make the long trip from Inverness to see a single patient. The young man was resting peacefully. His fever was down and he’d woken exactly twice to sip water from a cup that she held to his parched lips. He’d looked at her with those fathomless blue eyes and murmured “Thank ye” before lowering his head to the pillow with a sigh. Those were the only English words he’d uttered since arriving at the estate, but she was reassured by the coherence behind them. He was recovering from an unimaginable trauma, she reasoned. He would speak when he was ready.

Six blissful hours later, she stood outside her bedroom door and listened to the burr of Gaelic from within. Murtagh’s voice was familiar, as it tripped over words that were as craggy and softly rounded as the Scottish landscape itself. The second voice was deeper, more melodious and fluent, and she held her breath as she listened, trying to capture every nuance.

As she opened the door, the first thing she saw was Murtagh’s face, coloured white with shock. She stepped quickly towards the bed.

“Is everything alright?” she asked urgently.

“Aye,” Murtagh answered, although his expression said otherwise. “The lad and I have just been getting acquainted.”

She looked to the bed and saw that her patient was propped on his side against two extra pillows. The sheets were draped low on his hips, and she couldn’t help lingering on the elegant landscape of muscle and sinew that extended from neck to belly button. Her eyes then travelled to his back, which was still a pulpy mess of tissue and ooze. It would never again match the golden marble of his chest.

The young man seemed bothered by her scrutiny and shifted the sheets higher.

“Weel, I’ll be gettin’ about my work, if ye’re no’ needin’ me, milady,” Murtagh interrupted, seeming eager to flee.

“Yes, thank you again, Murtagh. I desperately needed the rest.”

Murtagh grunted in agreement and left without another word. Claire observed her patient, and he watched back impassively.

“Ye canna ‘ave slept verra long. The sun is still hi’ o’er the fields.”

She blinked at the subtle chastisement and the fluent, though accented English.

“I’m accustomed to little rest but thank you for your concern Mister…” she allowed the sentence to hang unfinished.

“Fraser. James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser, at yer service and in yer debt, mistress.” She got the impression that he would have stood and bowed, were it not for his back and the fact that he was quite naked beneath those sheets. There was a question in his eyes as he stated his name, as though he was waiting for her to recognize him.

“Very pleased to make your acquaintance at last, Mister Fraser. I’m Claire Elizabeth Randall.”

He visibly reacted as she spoke her name, and she lifted an eyebrow in inquiry.

“Did you know my husband, then?” she asked, trying to put her finger on the odd sensation that they must have crossed paths before. Certainly she would have remembered him, even if they had only met in passing.

“Nah. I dinna ken the current… laird. Tis only the place that is… familiar.” He broke off, looking about the room with a strange expression. Then, he seemed to collect himself. “Begging yer pardon, mistress. Tis no’ personal. I just ‘ave no fondness for the name Randall.” He pronounced the word as though it tasted bitter on his tongue, and she felt a sudden need to distance herself from his obvious revulsion.

“What about Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp, then?” she found herself suggesting. “That is my maiden name, and hopefully it carries no evil significance. For either of us.”

Oh, his eyes when he smiled at her. They lit some inner beacon inside him, like a lighthouse that broadcast both safety and peril. Her own lips trembled upwards in answer as he bent slightly in her direction.

“A verra great pleasure tae meet ye’, Mistress Beauchamp.”


	13. Chapter 13

He was growing frustrated by his convalescence. Two weeks had passed since he had first woken in his bedchamber at Lallybroch, only to find that he was no longer the laird of the castle and a pretty Sassenach woman had taken his place. While he lay abed, it was easy to dismiss the outrageous claim that Murtagh Fitzgibbons had made the night they met: that it was, in fact, the year 1942. He was half-certain that if he could rise and walk downstairs, he would find Jenny working in the kitchens next to Mrs. Crook, and Ian in the fields, bringing in the harvest. If that proved not to be the case, his plan was to march straight back to the standing stones to be transported back to his own time as soon as he was able. Both ideas were so equally absurd that the longer he considered them, the more disheartened he became.

It was the middle of the night and the fire burned low in its hearth, casting only the barest amber glow across the familiar room. Mistress Beauchamp was nowhere to be seen, for once, and his bladder was so full it ached. He’d been using something she called a bed pan to relieve himself, to his very grave embarrassment, but it was equally absent from view. 

Deciding it was time to fend for himself, he slid his legs to the edge of the mattress and let them drop slowly to the soft tapestry that covered the stone floor. There was no sign of his plaid nor a pair of breeks, so he held the bed linens around his hips with one hand and stood carefully. So long as he didn’t pivot or twist, the slowly healing skin of his back did not protest too loudly. He was weak as a kitten, however, and found that he could only take shuffling steps towards the oak armoire where he hoped to find a chamber pot.

“Just where do you think you’re going?” a sleepy, peevish voice inquired.

“Tae the privy, if ye must know,” he answered grouchily. It was bad enough being an invalid, but being caught bent and fragile as an old man hurt his pride.

“I suppose it didn’t occur to you to call out for assistance.”

“I s’pose it didn’t, being as I dinna want any.”

Mistress Beauchamp sighed in exasperation, then pointed towards an unfamiliar door in the opposite wall.

“The water closet is over there, if you have your heart set on self-injury. Here, I’ll even open the light for you, to show that there are no hard feelings.”

He might have laughed at her grudging capitulation, but he was instead stunned silent by the magical illumination of the tiny room. One moment it was entirely dark, and then his hostess pressed a round button and a white flare jumped from a fixture in the ceiling, more piercing than any candle flame.

“It’s alright,” she said, mistaking his shock. “The room has no windows, so we needn’t be worried about the Blackout Police. Heaven forbid that the Luftwaffe decide to start targeting remote Scottish castles that have barely been touched by the Industrial Revolution.”

He blinked in confusion at the torrent of strange words. Entering the room, the door swung closed behind him. Every item was utterly foreign, from the smooth white tiles to the strange basin-like contraption that hung from the wall. It couldn’t be the privy, as it was too high, even for a man of his stature. That left the oddly-shaped chair. Lifting its impossibly smooth lid, he found it contained clean water. Not having any more time for second guesses, he aimed into the bowl and released an endless stream of relief.

He emerged even more slowly than he entered to find Mistress Beauchamp waiting for him with an arm extended. He braced his free hand against her shoulder gratefully, forgetting his pride in the name of not falling to the ground in a heap. She helped him ease back onto his side.

“Get some rest, Mister Fraser, for tomorrow we tackle sitting in a chair,” she smiled, preparing to leave. He felt an acute urge to keep her nearby a little longer, despite the late hour.

“I canna sleep another wink. Do ye no’ have something I can do, tae make myself useful?”

“It seems a bit premature to be putting you to work. You were a step away from death less than a fortnight ago.”

He growled and punched his pillow several times in frustration, resigned to a night of watching the shadows from the fire.

“Do you enjoy reading?” she asked.

“Aye. It’s alright.” Anything to take him mind off contemplating his unthinkable situation.

Opening a drawer in the far night table, she extracted a thick, cloth-bound book.

“My husband was reading this when he was last home on leave. He was tremendously fond of Scottish history.” The hand that extended the book trembled a little, but he could make out the title along the spine. “The End of the Highland Way of Life: 1746 to 1812.”


	14. Chapter 14

Claire sat in an over-stuffed armchair as an icy northern wind rattled the unglazed windows, making the flames of the central hearth flicker and dance. October had descended upon the Highlands with a vengeance. The labourers were rushing to bring in the last of the harvest before the frosts came. She had the ledgers open on a low stool before her, trying once again to make sense of the complicated jumble of expenses and yields that the running of an estate entailed. The only thing she could conclude with any confidence was that there were significantly more expenses than yields.

The soft shuffle of slippered feet on the stone staircase announced his presence before James Fraser slowly entered the room. She was still not used to seeing him upright and was once again struck by just how _tall_ he was. No midget herself, he still towered over her when she rose to greet him.

“Dinna fash yer’self, Mistress Beauchamp. I ‘ave mastered the art of sitting upright, good pupil that I am.”

He settled carefully into her chair’s twin and extended his trouser-clad legs toward the fire with a groan. After a day’s stony silence following the news that she’d burned his ruined kilt, he’d begrudgingly accepted a borrowed pair of woolen trousers and a loose cotton shirt that didn’t abrade his still-tender back. The slippers he wore belonged to Frank and were a touch on the small side, but she hadn’t seen fit to mention that.

“I canna believe how it tires me just tae come down those stairs. I remember as a lad, running up and down from dawn til dusk as tho it t’were nothin’.”

It was the first time he’d mentioned anything remotely anecdotal, and Claire seized the moment, hoping to get this reticent man to open up a tiny bit. Despite his good manners, a quick wit and near-mythological stubbornness, he seemed trapped far inside himself with an abiding sadness that rose to the surface at the strangest moments. She guessed it was a consequence of whatever had caused his injury, but she wished he would trust her enough to share the burden.

“Did you grow up in an old house like Lallybroch, then?” she asked, trying to draw him out.

The look on his face made her instantly regretful. He looked… grief-stricken.

“Mister Fraser, I’m sorry…” she began, but he interrupted her apology.

“Aye, in a place verra much like Lallybroch,” he murmured. “But ‘twas verra different as weel.” He shot her a pained grin that effectively closed the subject, then glanced around for a distraction. She got the impression that were he not still winded from his trip down the stairs, he would have simply returned to his room.

“I see yer lookin’ after the ledgers for yer ‘usband, while he’s at war,” he said, nodding towards the open book.

It was her turn to inwardly flinch. She’d yet to tell anyone about Frank, and now a new concern had begun to tickle at the edge of her frazzled mind. She blinked away the glaze of tears from her eyes, before it could be noticed.

“Yes. Or at least I’m trying. I confess I find the keeping of the accounts utterly elusive. It’s like they were set down by some medieval savant purely to confound me.”

“Och, tis no’ sae bad as that, surely. Bring them ‘ere, and I’ll show ye.”

She rested the huge, leather-clad volume in his lap. His elegant hands caressed it briefly, as though greeting an old lover. Then, flipping to the page for 1942, he began his explanation.

“Now, this column’s fer the rents. Ye collected ‘em in September, aye?” She nodded, kneeling beside him. His confident voice took her on a journey away from her worries, and it was only in reflecting back later that night that she was struck by just how at home he was, sitting in front of the great fire, explaining the minutiae of fodder and grazing rights, of royal demesne and rent-in-kind.

Bidding each other goodnight at the top of the great stairs, he pronounced, “Yer a verra fine Lady of Lallybroch, Mistress Beauchamp, despite being a Sassenach. Yer husband is a lucky man.”

She nodded and managed to close the door to her temporary bed chamber before tears escaped her eyes.


	15. Chapter 15

Whatever his pedigree or faults, Jamie could not deny that Captain Frank Randall kept a very fine library. After tearing through the Highland history offered by Claire in one sleepless night, he sought out further reading on the subject, pretending his interest was merely academic. Book after book told a story both tragic and disheartening. Beaten by the English at Culloden, the Scottish clans preceded to dismantle their own culture more assiduously than any Redcoat had done. In the present day, the Highland way of life was nothing but a faint memory, with no more substance than a nursery tale remembered in adulthood.

Now that he could move about, Jamie spent many hours poring over faded manuscripts, records of birth and death, looking for some trace of his family. His sister Janet had married Ian Murray in 1740, and he found the baptismal records for James Alexander Gordon Fraser Murray and Margaret Ellen Murray, both registered in the Lallybroch village kirk. After that, silence. It was as though the mists of Culloden had settled upon his entire family and obscured them from the eye of history. Yet he continued to search for some trace of them, in tome after tome. Each time he came up with nothing, the pain in his heart grew.

Almost equally distressing was the Randall family tree, proudly framed and mounted in the great hall. Mistress Beauchamp was married to one Frank Wolverton Randall, the fifteen laird of Lallybroch since his ancestor, Jonathan Randall, Captain of His Majesty’s Dragoons, had been granted the forfeited estate in 1746. Jamie had taken to positioning his chair so that his back was turned to the offending document, but it mocked him all the same. 

There was nothing about living at Lallybroch that did not remind him of his strange plight. His heart yearned for home, even as he was surrounded by its familiar walls.

***

He’d come to the stables to unburden himself to Murtagh, the only person who knew his secret. He hadn’t counted on finding the Lady of Lallybroch kneeling in the straw bedding of an empty stall, purging her stomach into a feed pail.

“Mistress Beauchamp?” he asked tentatively, when there was a pause in the retching.

A feeble moan and a spitting noise were the only reply.

“Claire?” he tried a second time, pronouncing her name aloud for the first time.

“Leave me alone,” she whispered miserably.

“I’m afraid I canna do that, lass.”

He entered the stall and sank to her side.

“Go away, Mister Fraser,” she said with as much vigour as she could manage.

“Under the circumstances, it’d be best that ye call me Jamie.”

There was no answer, as she was busy being sick again. He tentatively rubbed her shaking shoulders and took it as a good sign that she didn’t yell at him once more. When the crisis appeared over, he silently rose and removed the offending pail, returning with a ladle of fresh water from the well in the courtyard. He settled in the straw next to her again.

“I reckon ye ken ye’ve got a bairn comin’, then?” he asked without preamble.

Owl-like eyes blinked at him in shock.

“Cook says yer ne’er hungry fer breakfast, but peckish at all ‘ours of the night. Ye’ve been sleeping like tis yer life’s work. And now I find ye heavin’ yer guts out in the stables. I might be no’ but a man, but I ken a thing or twa about ‘aving a bairn.”

At her lifted eyebrow he added, softly, “My sister, Jenny. She was just the same, wi’ ‘er two. It passes. Concentrate on how ‘appy yer ‘usband will be, when ye give ‘im the news.”

Instead of taking comfort in the thought she folded like a wilted flower, clutching her stomach as though gutted. Her hitching sobs tore at his heart.

“There, mistress. Hush, _mo gràidh_. Dinna cry, please,” he soothed uselessly. Finally, he pulled her to his chest, where her tears dampened his skin through his shirt.

When her initial anguish finally abated, she pulled herself away and dashed at her mottled face with her sleeve, trying to recover her poise and apologizing for her lapse all at once. He was overwhelmed by a potent mixture of protectiveness at her anguish and pride in her strength that glowed like a brazier behind his ribs.

It was a strange reaction for a healthy young bride of means, he considered as she continued to gather herself. In his admittedly scant experience, most women in similar circumstances would be thrilled.

A niggling thought intruded.

“Is it yer ‘usband, mistress? Is he… no’ coming back?”

She shook her head, her loosened curls clinging to her salty cheeks. He felt he had never seen anything more beautiful in his life. 

“No. He won’t be coming back.” And she began to cry again.

The whole story spilled out of her then. The letter back in August that announced Captain Randall’s death behind enemy lines while reconnoitering for the British Army. The tenuous financial situation of the estate and its occupants in wartime without the support his officer’s salary offered. The question of succession, when it became known that the last laird died without an heir. And now this pregnancy, a final gift from her departed husband; another dependent, another icy peak to scale with neither compass nor companion.

“Ye’re no’ alone, Sassenach,” he promised, petting the storm cloud of her curls. “I promise ye, ye shan’t be alone.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mo gràidh - my love


	16. Chapter 16

For a man who couldn’t walk more than fifty yards without getting winded, Jamie Fraser was still a force to be reckoned with when he set his mind to a task. In the two days since she’d confessed her dual secrets to him, he had directed labourers to a nearby bog to cut peat to burn through the winter instead of wood; suggested they mill the estate’s abundant acorns for flour, rather than letting the wild boar eat them all; shown Murtagh what was needed to repair the old grist mill; and sent the field hands out to collect the season’s last thornapples, so that Cook could stew them as preserves and dry them as fruit leather. He deferred publicly to her position as Lady of Lallybroch in all matters, but it was clear that he knew a great deal more than she about the running of the estate in hard times. How that came to be was a question she grew increasingly focused on answering.

With supper eaten and cleared away, they were now at opposite ends of the long couch in the great room. Claire sat with her legs curled by her side, a novel resting on her thighs. Jamie's feet were extended on an ottoman as he listened attentively to BBC Radio broadcast the latest news of the war.

Her guest treated the war with odd disassociation. Unlike most every other man she knew, he neither gloried in Britain’s triumphs nor seemed overly moved by her defeats. He asked strange questions about the location of Pearl Harbor and the size and nature of a Panzer division, but otherwise absorbed the news in silence. The Duke of Sandringham’s comment about the dubious dedication of the Scots to the war effort came to mind. In truth, she barely knew Jamie, but she was certain he was not a coward nor a draft dodger. As usual, all her suppositions about his motivations led her to barred doors that she did not feel entitled to open.

The news ended with the usual orchestral flourish and was replaced by quiet jazz.

Jamie stirred and looked her way. “I’ve been thinking, Sassenach...”

She smirked, both at the now familiar nickname and the fact that Jamie _always_ seemed to be thinking. He was often silent, as though over-awed by the simplest of daily occurrences, but it was clear that he was a man who reasoned deeply, yet preferred action to words. It was a practical intelligence, when contrasted with Frank’s cerebral style. If her late husband had been a florid adjective, James Fraser was all verb.

“I ken tis yer decision but would it no’ be wise tae consult the law about yer… situation?” he finished delicately. She’d yet to tell anyone else about Frank’s death or her pregnancy, and she appreciated Jamie’s discretion.

“I thought of that, Jamie. But I’m worried about what will happen if word gets back to the Duke of Sandringham before I’m ready. He’s connected to every High Street lawyer in Scotland, I’m certain of it.”

Jamie grinned what she’d come to consider his piratical grin before suggesting, “Aye. Where’er in Scotland could we find a man of the law who wouldna go blethering tae an English laird about keepin’ Lallybroch out of ‘is clutches?”

She couldn’t help smiling back at him, despite the seriousness of her situation. Their eyes clutched and held for a long moment, before she broke the hold and looked down at her lap, smile fading.

“If you could make some discreet inquiries…” she murmured.

“Consider it done.” He rose carefully from the couch and came to stand before her.

“It’s time fer me tae be beddin’ down wi’ Murtagh in the croft, Mistress Beauchamp.”

The switch from the familiar to the formal was not lost of her, and she rebelled against it instinctively.

“Absolutely not! You’re still healing. And you are not a labourer. You’re my guest.”

“I’ve strayed in yer bed too long already,” he protested, and then blushed as he realized what he’d just said. He plowed ahead anyway. “Yer a widowed woman, and tis no’ right for me tae… weel, ye ken what I mean.”

“I most certainly do not. I’ve been a widow for as long as you’ve known me. Nothing about that has changed. I will not hear of it, Jamie. If you feel badly for depriving me of my bed, we can switch bedchambers. You aren’t sleeping in that damp croft, and that’s final.” She rose to stand in front of him, her fists resting against her hips and her chin thrown back in defiance.

“Did no-one e’er tell ye that yer as stubborn as a whole team o’ oxen, Sassenach?” he said with resigned affection.

“Let there be no mistake, Mister Fraser. I’m _far_ more stubborn than a whole team of oxen.”

**

Ned Gowan looked every bit the part of a disreputable lawyer. His long hair was pulled back into a greasy pigtail, and he had the narrow, canny eyes of a larcenist. Jamie would not divulge where he’d located the man, but he begged Claire to listen with an open mind as he set forth his argument.

The royal grant that saw Lallybroch pass from a family of Jacobite traitors into the hands of Frank Randall’s ancestors was clear. Lallybroch would be held in perpetuity by successive generations of Randalls until there was no direct heir, at which time it would pass to the current Duke of Sandringham, to whose line protectorship of the estate had been given. As long as the customary payment of a hundred pounds was made twice a year and a Randall resided at the estate, Lallybroch was theirs.

There could be no question in anyone’s mind that the child Claire bore was the lawful heir of Captain Frank Randall, conceived after their marriage and before his death.

Therefore, once born her child would be the natural inheritor of Lallybroch. During the child’s minority, Claire would hold the estate in trust and be responsible for its management.

“Even though I’m a woman? Even though I’m… not a Scot?” Claire asked, her hand unconsciously touching her still-flat belly.

“Oh, yes, my dear. British history is full of examples of foreign women wielding power in the absence of their native husbands. On that subject, the law is very clear,” the lawyer responded with a twinkle in his eye. “I’m not saying the Duke will not try to contest it, but the child you carry is the future Lord or Lady of Lallybroch.”

She was totally engrossed in what Ned Gowan was saying, so she missed the look of mute agony that travelled over Jamie’s face.

**

The relief she felt after Ned Gowan’s visit put her in a playful mood. She ribbed Jamie good-naturedly about his peculiar fondness for Cook’s cock-a-leekie soup at the supper table.

“Tis almost as good as my mam’s recipe, Sassenach. She would make it when’er I was ill, or when I strayed too long in the dreich and came home frozen tae the marrow, which was often.”

She opened her mouth to ask about his mother, but he forestalled her question with his own.

“Where’abouts are yer people, Sassenach? I ken they’re no’ here in Scotland, but do they visit ye?”

The smile fled from her face, and Jamie immediately looked contrite.

“Claire, I dinna mean to…”

“It’s alright. It’s just that, well… I don’t have any ‘people’. Not really. Not the way you mean.”

He emitted a soft sigh and reached for her hand where it rested on the table.

“My, err… my parents died when I was quite young. In the influenza epidemic that followed the Great War. My uncle, Lambert, raised me until I was old enough to attend boarding school. It was quite the unconventional upbringing, visiting all manner of places, wherever his work took him. He was an archaeologist, you see.”

Jamie nodded absently.

“Lamb died before the war. Cancer. It’s been just me since then. Well, and Frank.”

“How long were ye marrit tae ‘im?”

“Less than a year. Love during wartime, I suppose. We met last June, were married by October, and he was deployed only weeks later. We last saw each other in August, and then…” Her free hand unconsciously strayed to her flat tummy.

“I’m sae sorry, Sassenach.” She was grateful there wasn’t an ounce of pity in his tone, only sincere regret.

“No, it’s alright. It sounds cold, but we weren’t together long enough for me to truly miss him. Anyway, you asked after my people, but all I have are memories.”

A pained noise burst from Jamie’s throat.

“Ye ken that isna true, Claire. Afore ye know it, ye’ll have yer wee bairn tae raise. And the men and women of this estate care for ye, truly.”

“Do they?” she asked, glancing at him sideways.

“Aye.” Jamie nodded, but said no more.


	17. Chapter 17

It was long past time to do something he’d been putting off since he first regained consciousness and realized that he had somehow leapt forward through time to a Lallybroch that was no longer his family’s estate.

There was a dusting of snow on the ground, and large, lazy flakes fell from a steel grey sky. He slipped once, climbing the low hill in the pasture beyond the stables, and swore fluently in Gaelic. His back still ached, but it was his lack of strength and endurance that truly bothered him. Accustomed to ruddy physical vigour, it hurt his pride to be a mere onlooker in the day-to-day labour about the estate.

There were trees growing up through the ancient dry-stone walls. The whole hillside had a forgotten, neglected air, but he would know the place blind-folded. He knelt in front of the largest gravestone and began peeling moss away from its chilled, damp surface.

“ _Halo da. Halo mam. Is e mise a th ’ann._ ”

Brian and Ellen Fraser had lain in this earth for more than two hundred years, but he could still remember his father’s hearty laugh, his mother’s sweet smile. The pain of losing them at a young age was still as fresh as the pink scars on his back.

He wished they could reach through the veil and guide him, just one last time.

In a few weeks, he would be fully recovered. He’d read voraciously since Claire laid her late husband’s library at his disposal. He knew what happened to the Scots who had supported the true king in the aftermath of Culloden. Treason charges. Imprisonment. Death from a thousand petty hardships. And for those who survived, the slow decay of their language, their customs, their very way of living. Here in 1942 he saw only the softest echo of his culture, of the places and people he called home.

He longed to return to his time and to his remaining family, back through the stones on Craig na Dunn and back into the story he had been writing for himself since he was a young lad. It felt dishonest to live on this estate that was no longer his, comfortable and well-fed, while back in 1746 Scotland was suffering.

But what would it serve, to return to certain bondage? And who was he to say that the stones would send him back to his time? He had carried with him from a young age a sense that he was meant for some larger purpose, that he had been forged for something bigger than sheer existence. Surely it wasn’t merely to add his name to the list of Scotland’s glorious dead, moldering away in those dusty tomes he spent his days poring over. Lallybroch’s history was already written, and it ended with the estate in the hands of a bonnie pregnant Sassenach widow carrying the child of his tormenter’s descendent.

He tried to clear his mind, to listen for words of wisdom whispered from beyond the grave.

None came.

He dashed at his eyes as tears of frustration welled up. And then he began to pray.

By the time he rose, knees stiff and cold from kneeling in the snow, he knew what he must do.

 _Tha toil Dhè air a dhèanamh_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Halo da. Halo mam. Is e mise a th ’ann. - Hello Dad. Hello Mom. It's me.
> 
> Tha toil Dhè air a dhèanamh. - God's will be done.


	18. Chapter 18

She muttered a stream of curses under her breath as snow crested the tops of her boots and spilled inside, puddling around her stockinged feet.

“Has no-one e’er remarked to ye that ye swear like a sailor, Sassenach?” Jamie said, pulling her uphill by her chilled hand.

“I only swear when provoked, you bloody bastard. What could be so important that it couldn’t wait for me to don my gloves? Or for spring, for that matter?”

Jamie didn’t respond, but he had the same nervous hum of anticipation that had glowed around him for days now. When he’d suggested they take a very unseasonal walk in the snow, she’d gone with him purely in the hope that she might glean some clue to his strange mood. It wasn’t the despondency of his earliest days at Lallybroch. At strange moments, she caught him looking at her as though trying to solve some arcane riddle written on the lines of her face. It wasn’t a lascivious glance, but it warmed her insides all the same.

Finally they came to a halt in an old graveyard she hadn’t known existed. There was a stillness about the place that held all her inquiries at bay.

“I have a strange tale tae tell ye, Sassenach, and I want ye tae hear me through afore ye speak. Can ye promise me that?”

She nodded, suddenly apprehensive what he was about to say would break her heart.

He knelt by a gravestone and dusted off its covering of snow. Taking a deep breath of frosty air, he began to talk.

“Brian Robert David Fraser met Ellen Mackenzie at a Mackenzie clan gathering in 1716. She was promised tae Malcolm Grant, but instead the pair snuck out of Castle Leoch t’gether in the ded of night. Their first bairn, William, was born nine months hence, and by then the Mackenzie were resigned tae the union, e’en though Brian was only the base born son of auld Lord Lovat. It was a love match, and they were verra happy t’gether. A daughter, Janet, followed. And eventually, another son. James. James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser.”

She gasped but didn’t dare speak.

Jamie continued with his story, seemingly speaking to himself, lost in reminiscence. It was an unfathomably detailed tale of childhood memories and family lore, and she found herself caught up in the web of words he was weaving, not stopping to question how they could possibly be true.

He spoke of his mother’s untimely death, of growing into a young man surrounded by the bucolic familiarity of home. About the burden of being the son of a lesser laird with no fortune. Going overseas as a mercenary, first for the Dutch and later for the French crown. Coming home to find the English abusing their power over the Highland Scots, being fostered to his Uncle Dougal, a committed Jacobite, and his father’s sudden passing. Feeling adrift, without the firm anchor of home, and enlisting in the Catholic cause. Fighting bravely at Prestonpans and being awarded a position of tacksman in the Jacobite army. Leading mere boys and undisciplined farmers into battle, knowing that the Scottish position at Culloden was unwinnable, but being willing to lay down his life for the cause of seeing his country free of English tyranny. Waking as a prisoner. The unbearable pain of his torture at the hands of a nameless Redcoat officer. His escape. Fleeing blindly at dawn and collapsing near death at the feet of a circle of standing stones. A magical place, left over from the time of the Old Ones. And then, silence…

She came back to herself as though waking from a profound sleep. Frozen tears crusted her lashes.

“Do ye believe me, Claire?” he asked, voice broken and unsure.

She had no rational framework on which to measure his truthfulness, so she listened to her heart. It told her that this man had no conceivable reason to invent such an incredible story. It told her that the passion and homesickness that had travelled over his face as he spoke could not be manufactured. It told her that there was a fundamental truthfulness about Jamie. It told her, above all, that this was the reason for his voiceless, stoic suffering in the weeks since he’d awoken at Lallybroch.

“Murtagh…” she whispered.

“Aye, Murtagh knows. I dinna ken what I said in my fever, but he ‘ad all sorts of strange questions when I woke. He harkens from the Isle of Lewis, ye ken, and he… weel… he’s a believer in the Old Ways, in the po’er of those stones.”

They crouched there in the snow next to a forgotten grave for so long her muscles cramped. She stared at her bare hands, twisting the gold wedding band Frank had placed on her finger in endless circles. There was little noise, except the occasional bough of fir releasing its burden to the ground.

Jamie finally stood stiffly and offered his hand. “Come, yer cold. I’ll see ye back to the house.” There was resignation in his tone, and in the set of his shoulders.

She rose but did not move nor release his hand.

“Tell me again about the stones,” she requested.

He hesitated, then described again the ring of standing stones at the top of the hill called Craig na Dunn.

“They beckoned tae me. I dinna ken how else tae say it. I was more than half ded, but I remember a hum, a force, like… like a tide that pulls ye out tae sea.”

“And then?”

“And then, nothin’. Next I kent, I was ‘wakening in the laird’s room at Lallybroch, seein’ ye watch o’er me.”

She blushed, remembering that strangely intimate moment of looking at, and then into, Jamie’s Delft blue eyes for the first time.

“Do ye believe me, Claire?” he asked again, pleading with those same inexorable eyes.

“Yes, Jamie. Yes, I believe you.”

His relief was so great he stumbled forward on watery legs, catching himself just as he fell into her embrace. Holding her there, in front of his parents’ graves, he drew his first deep breath in what felt like ages.

“Does this mean… that you’ll be leaving? Is that why you’ve told me?” She trembled in reaction.

“Nah, Sassenach. I willna say it didna cross my mind, and Murtagh offered to bring me back tae Craig na Dunn once I was healed.”

He pulled back to look into her upturned face, pale and hopeful, with eyes so deep they trapped his soul.

“But I couldna go. All tha’ awaits me in my own time is violence and death. Here, wi’ ye, I feel useful. Needed. When I traveled through the stones, they burned away all my yesterdays, but this is a fine place tae build my t’morrows. If ye’ll permit me tae stay, that is.”

She gave him another quick hug before releasing him.

“Of course. I wouldn’t know what to do without you, James Fraser.”

They grinned at one another and slowly began to make their way down the hill towards the estate. Neither seemed in a hurry to release the other’s hand.

“Jamie?” she asked as they approached the stables.

“Aye, Sassenach?”

“What made you tell me? Don’t get me wrong, I’m humbled you trusted me enough to do so. But…”

He paused in the snowy meadow and glanced upward, as though looking for an answer in the overcast sky.

“Nevermind,” she hastened to say. “Your reasons are your own, of course.”

“I ken what ye’er asking me, Sassenach. I’m only searching fer the words tae explain.” After several moments, he went on, “Have ye e’er passed a day so bonnie and blue that God ‘imself must be smilin’ o’er yer shoulder?” At her nod, he continued, “And yet all the while ye ken that if ye dinna honour tha’ day by bein’ the best version of yerself, it would disappear wi’ the wind, aye? There’s a truthfulness between us Sassenach, I believe, and I dinna want tae break it, by no’ tellin’ ye who I really am.”

Claire mulled over this declaration as they returned to the main house. Before they parted to their respective chores, she had one final thought on the matter.

“I never could have predicted what you shared with me today, Jamie. And I’m sure I’ll have more questions, with time. But on one point I’m absolutely certain. Nothing that you’ve told me or will ever tell me could change my opinion of who you truly are.”


	19. Chapter 19

Released from the prison of his secret, Jamie flourished over the weeks leading up to the festive season. With the wounds on his back and shoulder finally healed, he helped Murtagh in the stables and about the estate each day, slowly regaining his strength. In the evenings, he sat with Claire in the great room, helping with the ledgers, conversing quietly, or listening to the frequent BBC Radio updates from the front.

Now that she understood the source of Jamie’s strange ambivalence regarding the war, she tried to provide him with as much context as possible. It helped that he was a worldly, educated man for his time, but the advances in technology were such that he spent many nights in quiet, stunned silence as she described aerial bombing raids, the convoluted alliances between countries that spread the globe and chemical warfare.

“But why, Sassenach? What cause unites Germany, the Turks and Japan, and pits them against Britain, France and Russia? Millions have died, ye say, but for what end?”

She knew what her answer was supposed to be: the fight against global hegemony, restoring the balance of power, ensuring that democracy prevailed over tyranny. But she couldn’t say those things to Jamie, because she knew he would see them for what they were: academic constructs that meant nothing to the common man whose blood was being shed. 

Instead, she distracted him with stories about her own travels, following her Uncle Lambert around the globe from one archaeological dig to the next. An orphan and obligatory nomad himself, he listened to her story of rootlessness with sympathy but no pity. She found herself sharing memories she’d thought were boxed away for good, little glimpses of a life she’d been forced to leave behind upon her uncle’s death. They hurt as they rose to the surface, like debriding a wound, but if her eyes watered in the firelit room, Jamie did not comment. Perhaps he attributed it to the peat smoke.

“And when yer uncle passed, ye marrit Frank?” he asked one such night, after they’d each drunk a few glasses of sherry.

He seldom mentioned Frank, and usually only obliquely.

“No. I settled in London, shared a flat with some other single girls, and enrolled in nurse’s college. Uncle Lamb left me enough money to pay my board, tuition and such. And when the war broke out, the army were very eager to recruit nurses for their field hospitals. I met Frank at a mixer; a social event organized for British soldiers. He was still in officer’s training. I was scheduled to deploy to the continent once my schooling was finished. Before I knew it, we were married.”

“Ye did no’ go tae war, then?” She wondered what Jamie made of all of this. She was no historian, but she imagined the idea of paying a woman to serve on the battlefront, even if she was not actually fighting, must be foreign to his eighteenth-century view of the world. Come to think of it, Frank hadn’t been very fond of the idea either.

“No. Once we were married, Frank arranged for me to come to Lallybroch, to mind the estate. One of the perks of being an enlisted officer, I imagine.”

Some of her disenchantment must have crept into her voice, because Jamie’s next words were, “Many’s the way a lady can serve her country, Claire. My da would say…” he trailed off, looking bashful.

“Say what?” she prodded.

“That a strong woman was worth three men, fer she could tend a hearth, grow a new life, and defend her kin more fiercely than any hired soldier. He’d say it of ye, Sassenach.”

She blushed at the unexpected praise, lowering her eyes to the empty sherry glass twisting between her fingers.

“Sometimes I wonder…” she began, but then stopped herself, not wishing to slander the dead. She could feel Jamie’s articulate eyes watching her. “Well, never mind. Would you care for more sherry?”

What she couldn’t say was that she wondered whether her late husband had ever truly known her at all.

**

Yuletide was a somber affair. News of Frank’s death had by now reached the tenants, adding a pall to what was already a holiday of austerity. Claire worked many late nights with Mrs. Fitz and Cook by her side. On the day before Christmas she delivered two wooden crates to Murtagh.

“There’s a pair of woolen socks and a clementine for each child on the estate and in the village. Can you please see that they are given out today?”, she requested. “And once that’s done, please tell the labourers that they are free to go home. I don’t want to see them back before Hogmanay. Jamie and I can tend the livestock for a few days.”

Murtagh opened his mouth, but Claire raised her hand, forestalling any complaint.

“I don’t want to hear it, Mr. Fitzgibbons. And make certain each man takes a cloutie dumpling home with him. They’re underneath the clementines.”

**

“I’ll jus’ ride tae the village on Donas, and meet ye there,” Jamie evaded, looking unusually nervous but dapper in navy trousers, a clean shirt and borrowed tweed jerkin.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Jamie. It’s freezing out tonight, and you’ll be late for midnight mass besides.”

Her Scot made an indeterminate noise in his throat, neither acquiescing nor contesting her point.

“It’s just a short drive. That old Vauxhall Cadet can barely break twenty miles an hour, and I’m a very good driver.” She neglected to mention the slight handicap of not being able to use the vehicle’s headlights, on account of the blackout. Fortunately, she had the route to the village memorized by now and the moon was waxing full.

“I dinna doubt it, Sassenach. I just… twenty miles an ‘our? Did ye say yer automobile can travel o’er twenty miles an ‘our?”

He pronounced it as three separate words, each carrying the possibility of detonating in his mouth: auto, mo, bile. 

Claire grabbed her warmest coat and scarf, then pulled Jamie, still balking, towards the courtyard where the car sat idling. Five minutes later, navigating the moonlit road into the village, he could be heard muttering in Gaelic from the passenger’s seat, getting a headstart on his Yuletide prayers.

**

The tiny stone church was lit only by tapers, so it wasn’t until she filed back to the Lallybroch pew after receiving communion that she noticed Murtagh sitting alone in a dim corner near the door. She had to dodge a few well-wishers at the end of mass in order to accost him before he could sneak away.

“Murtagh, what are you doing here? I told you and the other men to go home to your families over the holidays.”

Jamie joined her, nerves considerably calmed by the familiar church rituals. Murtagh gave him a beseeching look.

“What?” she asked, looking between their faces and annoyed at their apparent complicity.

“Sassenach, Murtagh comes from the Isle of Lewis. Even if he’d hied away t’day, he canna make it there an’ back in no’ but a week.”

Claire bit her lip, chagrinned that it never occurred to her to wonder if her labourers could take advantage a holiday, or if she’d merely complicated their lives with what she believed was benevolence. It was one of those moments when she was certain she would never adequately fill the role of Lady of Lallybroch.

“It’s nae yer fault, Claire,” Jamie assured her quietly, obviously reading her dismay on her face. “I ken the other lads were fit tae burst when they heard the news an’ saw their cloutie dumpling.”

She squared her shoulders and raised her chin, wrestling her confidence back into place.

“Well, there’s nothing for it, then. Murtagh, I insist you join Jamie and I in the main house for Christmas dinner tomorrow. And when the holidays are over, and the time is convenient for you, you shall take two weeks to visit your family. It must be an age since you last saw them.”

“Mistress, I canna…” Murtagh began, but his mistress was already on the move.

“I don’t want to hear of it. Now please join us in the auto.mo.bile. I may need you to administer smelling salts to our fearless Highland warrior on the road home.”


	20. Chapter 20

It was strangely intimate, sharing Lallybroch with Claire over the holidays when most everyone else was away. He found himself deviating between an easy casualness that reminded him of his parents, and a stiff formality that reminded him of his place as a guest in the house of a widowed Englishwoman.

The modern wonder that was the icebox meant that Cook did not have to prepare food for them each day. Mrs. Fitz was visiting her niece in Elgin, leaving only Murtagh to frown at him as he mucked the stalls and shouldered bales of hay down from the grange like a stable boy, and then washed up and sat down to supper as though he was laird of the manor.

He was profoundly confused.

All his short life he’d never hesitated, never faltered. If there was a decision to be made, he made it, and lived with the consequences. If there was a step to be taken, he forged ahead, eyes wide open.

Now he wavered, uncertain, two equally obscured paths laying before him.

He sensed Claire observing him as they ate leftover turkey with chestnut stuffing, warmed up in the huge AGA cooker that dominated the kitchen. It reminded him of Mrs. Crook’s cooking from when he was a boy.

“What was Christma…, sorry, Yuletide, like when you were young?” He squinted at her, wondering if she knew some sorcery that allowed her to see directly into his thoughts. He dearly hoped not.

“Nae sae verra different, really. We ne’er exchanged gifts – that was for Hogmanay – but Jenny an’ I loved tae stay up late, go tae mass and light our nativity candles. There’d be some huge beast roasting on a spit fer days, an’ the whole house fair reeked of it, sae ye were always hungry. E’ry day, some new guest or family would arrive, ‘til on the eve of Hogmanay the castle was burstin’ with folk, all talkin’ an’ drinkin’ an’ laughin’.”

“That sounds wonderful. I hope Lallybroch can be like that again, someday,” she said wistfully.

“It will be, Sassenach. I ken it.”

**

Murtagh had loaned him a necktie, and it was slowly choking him. There was a light knock on his bedchamber door, and he yanked miserably at the stiff collar as he went to answer it. Claire stood on the other side, looking positively radiant in her burgundy dress. He felt his cheeks flushing and hoped he could blame the cravat.

“Oh no,” she giggled as she took in his costume. “That simply will not do.”

He considered feigning insult, but her voice was too musical, her eyes too merry as she laughed at his outfit.

“Twas your idea tae dress up fer Hogmanay! An’ now ye’re laughing at me, lass?”

She merely smiled more broadly, and held out a bulky, paper-wrapped package that he’d somehow missed in his earlier perusal of her pretty frock and berry-ripe lips.

“Your Hogmanay gift, Mister Fraser,” she pronounced cheekily, and he wondered if she’d already sampled the rum punch Cook had laid out on the table downstairs.

“Sassenach, I…”

“Don’t. Please. This is yours. If you won’t accept it as a gift, consider it reparation for a past mistake.”

And with that she turned and left his doorway. He set the package, which was surprising light considering its size, on his bed and proceeded to open it, hands shaking slightly. 

Inside he found a Fraser plaid.

Dashing the onrush of moisture from his eyes, he quickly shed his borrowed suit and wrapped the plaid with practiced ease around his hips and over his shoulder, securing it with his belt and sporran.

He was about to rush down the stairs to thank Claire when he realized he had nothing to give her in return. His eyes cast about his room, but everything there already belonged to her. He had no money, and it was too late to buy a gift in any event. He hooked his thumbs beneath his belt, a grimace of concentration on his face. Then he smiled and walked towards the door.

**

The great hall was filled with chatter and music, merriment and cheer. Claire had invited anyone even remotely associated with Lallybroch to celebrate Hogmanay, and they all seemed to have accepted.

The lady of the estate walked about the room, chatting easily with her guests, offering more refreshments, and generally playing the cordial hostess. He stood near a stone pillar watching her, scowling as a drunken shopkeeper grabbed her by the waist and spun her for a reel across the gleaming flagstones. Jamie took a step into the room when she lay a hand across her still-flat belly, ready to intervene, but she was merely catching her breath.

Flushed and thirsty, she took refuge in his quiet corner.

“Don’t you like dancing, Jamie?” she asked as she sipped her punch.

“Aye, but as an onlooker. Wi’ these feet, t’would be a cruelty tae step on y’…, um, a lass.”

“Pity, since you’re dressed the part.”

“Sassenach, thank ye. Truly. I ne’er meant for ye to feel responsible fer burning my plaid, ye ken? Twas just the last in a series of blows.”

“Think nothing of it. I’m just happy it got here in time. When it hadn’t arrived by Christmas, I was panicked.”

“Where’er did ye find it?”

“Oh, just a little shop in Inverness that Murtagh knows. I rang them on the telephone back in November.”

Jamie shook his head in wonder. She’d bought this plaid to replace the one he’d ruined coming through the stones, even before he’d told her his strange tale. Before they exchanged family histories and truly gotten to know one another. Before she started to look at him the way she was looking just now.

“I have something for ye as weel, Sassenach,” he said, taking a fortifying gulp of whisky and then placing the glass on a nearby ledge. He opened his sporran and withdrew the object he knew Claire should have, just as the plaid he wore belonged to him.

“Jamie, I… that’s… I mean… what is it?” she stuttered, her usual eloquence failing her in the sudden heat of his gaze.

“Tis my key. To Lallybroch. It belongs to ye, Claire.”

She held the heavy iron balanced across both palms as though accepting a sacred relic. When it became apparent she would not be speaking, he added, “Yer the rightful Lady of Lallybroch, Sassenach. Ye’ll do right by its people. Teach the bairn tae do the same.”

Her face turned pale, her taffy eyes huge. She grabbed for his hand, the key fumbling between them.

“I can’t. Jamie, I can’t. I can’t accept this. Lallybroch is as much yours as mine.” Then, so quiet he had to lean down to hear her over the music, “Please, don’t make me do this alone.”

His heart was riven in two inside his chest, a tearing sensation that felt like birth and death combined. How could he deny what he’d already promised her? A clear path forward emerged from the fog, and he took his first, fateful step.

“There is a way, Sassenach…”


	21. Chapter 21

Claire lay in the lord’s bed at Lallybroch, the warmth of her husband radiating against her back. She could tell by his breathing that he was not asleep. He lay perfectly still, a discrete distance separating them.

It occurred to her that Jamie was the second man with whom she’d shared this bed in the past six months, and both were her husband at the time. She was married to a man who had not fathered the baby she carried and whom she knew only marginally better than the man who had. She was an Englishwoman responsible for a minor Scottish estate, a nurse who had saved just one life, but that life was now tied to hers until parted by death.

Jamie had proposed using a far more pragmatic view of their circumstances, and she tried to adopt his approach. She needed help of the exact sort that he could offer. He had no-one, and she needed someone. It was the least romantic reason for marriage that she could imagine, and yet just this afternoon they had stood in the village kirk and nervously recited their vows.

_I, Claire Elizabeth Randall (only Jamie’s eyes had flinched), take thee, James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser, to be my lawfully wedded husband._

She’d worn an ivory dress in the old style, loosened slightly to allow for the gentle swelling below her waist, and clutched a posy of cowslip and thistle. Jamie had worn his Fraser plaid, his long auburn curls gathered at his nape, his cobalt eyes fixed on her like she was the pivot point of the universe. She’d suffered a hundred bouts of cold feet since that moment four weeks earlier when Jamie had made his hesitant, key-inspired proposal, but that one look at the altar warmed her to her toes. She was making the right choice.

Still, the wedding had almost not taken place because of a technicality. Jamie was, for all intents and purposes, an undocumented alien. He had no birth certificate, no baptismal records they could reference, nothing to prove that he existed in any official capacity. No-one could doubt he was a Scot, with his heavy burr, fluent Gaelic, and Norse pedigree written on every sharp angle of his face, but in 1943 that was not enough to seek permission to marry.

A frantic call to Ned Gowan, and a solution was proposed. If Jamie presented himself at the Registrar’s Office in Edinburgh, he could claim to have lost his official documentation and apply for an emergency replacement. 

They drove south on a Tuesday. Ned agreed to meet them at a tavern to describe his cleverly concocted backstory of a home birth, illiterate parents and a house fire. The trip down the motorway had left Jamie shaken and moody, complaining about the noise and filth of the large industrial city. Claire listened attentively to Ned and thanked him profusely for his help. She was coming to like the cunning little lawyer.

Afterwards, it was too late to attend at the Registry. They ate a simple meal and then Claire arranged for lodging upstairs at the tavern. As she signed the guestbook as Mr. and Mrs. James Fraser, the tavern owner glanced at her gold wedding band (she’d yet to take it off) and swollen belly, then at Jamie’s bare left hand, and grunted.

Just inside the room, Jamie paced and glowered. She tried to ignore him, gathering a basin of water from the common watercloset and shedding her uncomfortable shoes. As she began to let down her hair, his pacing ceased. He looked positively scandalized.

“Just what do ye think ye’re doing?”

“I’m getting ready for bed. You should consider doing the same.”

“We canna sleep in the same bedchamber! Not when we’re nae marrit.” His voice was a low hiss, as though a priest was listening at the door.

“We’ve done so before, when you were ill. And the purpose of this trip is so that we can be married, or had you forgotten? Besides, we’re already registered as Mr. and Mrs. Fraser, and we cannot afford a second room. Just take off your boots, wash up, and try not to hog all the blankets.” She flounced onto the hard mattress, knowing she was antagonizing him, but preferring his ire to his brooding silence.

“Christ. Claire… Mistress Beauchamp…” he broke off, huffing like an angry bull.

“I prefer Sassenach, if you don’t mind,” she interrupted snidely.

“Tis no’ right, Claire, and ye ken it. I willna risk yer reputation…”

“Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ, Jamie, would you listen to yourself?! My reputation is mine to risk as I see fit, thank you very much. This isn’t the eighteenth century, and I don’t need you to protect my honour.”

As soon as the words left her mouth, she knew she’d gone too far. His head snapped back as though she’d struck him. 

“Aye. Ye’ve made that perfectly clear. I canna be ought but who I am, Claire. I’d rather ye no’ mock me fer it,” he said angrily, his eyes hardening.

“I’m not your property, James Fraser. I took care of myself long before you were around to sermonize and disapprove of me,” she retorted.

“Do ye no’ want to be wed, then?” Just one more step, and they would be hurtling down a route from which there would be no returning.

“That’s not what I meant at all,” Claire conceded, quieter. She reached out a hand, trying to pull him towards her and make some sort of amends. He ignored the gesture, tearing a blanket and a limp pillow from the bed and throwing them to the floor on the farthest side of the room. She considered protesting, but then merely shrugged. It wasn’t as though the bed would be much more comfortable.

“Suit yourself. Goodnight, Jamie.” She dimmed the oil lamp and listened to the angry scuffle of his clothing being rearranged. 

Her eyes were just beginning to droop when the darkness spoke. “I dinna like the deceit. Lyin’ about who my parents were, where I’m from, who ye are tae me. It curdles my gut.”

She rose up on an elbow and tried to see him through the moonlight coming through the sooty window. “You don’t have to go through with it. We can call off the wedding and…”

“No,” he interrupted. “No, Sassenach. That’s nae what I want at all. I ken what is needed tae marry ye, an’ I’ll do it. I just wish it werena necessary tae build something true on top of sae much falsity.”

She lay silent for so long, Jamie must have assumed she’d fallen asleep. With a barely uttered “G’night, Sassenach,” he rolled over and did not stir until dawn. She lay awake, watching blue shadows creep across the plaster ceiling.

A similar scene now played out in their marital bed, except this time she was fairly certain Jamie was watching the shadows with her. She could feel tension radiating off him like radio waves. An unexpected brush against her shoulder made her jump. She peered backwards, watching Jamie rise to loom over her in his nightshirt, the whorls of his chest hair peering through the open collar. A shiver ran through her like an approaching storm.

“Ye needn’t be afraid of me, Claire. I wasna planning to suddenly force myself on ye.”

“I never thought you would,” she responded honestly. Of all the musings that kept her awake on her wedding night, having to manage the advances of a suddenly amorous bridegroom did not factor. Jamie had never treated her with anything but the utmost decorum. Even when the priest had invited him to kiss his new bride earlier today, he had done little more than carefully press his dry lips to hers for a breathless second, before pulling back and tucking his chin to his chest, grinning bashfully. 

“I ken ye may have… questions,” Jamie continued. “About how we shall get on as husband and wife. And I’ll do what I can tae answer them fer ye. But fer now, fer t’night, wi’ the bairn and all that’s happened tae ye… Did ye want me tae sleep in my room? Leave ye in peace?”

“This is your room now. I want you to sleep here. Everything else, we can work out later.”

“Aye. T’morrow. And all the days after that. G’night then, Sassenach.” He settled back against the pillows.

“Goodnight, Jamie.”


	22. Chapter 22

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Twenty-two chapters in, and this story is finally going to earn that M rating. Barely.

The honeymoon was Claire’s idea. After two weeks of painfully polite coexistence in which she felt they were both acting the parts of a newly married couple for an audience of two, she suggested the getaway. Jamie had never heard of such a thing. She insisted time spent cloistered away from their everyday lives was now the norm for newlyweds, and he begrudgingly agreed. They left as soon as Murtagh returned from his visit home to the Isle of Lewis.

Jamie was an uneasy automobile passenger, and he refused to learn how to drive, so it was Claire who navigated onto the ferry that crossed the narrow channel to the Isle of Skye.

“Are you alright?” she asked as Jamie clutched the door handle in a white knuckled grip.

“Aye. Jus’ no’ fond of ships, is all,” he answered, eyes pointed out the windshield as though he could bring the looming island closer with the strength of his stare.

“Just a few more minutes, _an duine agam_ ,” she assured, taking his clammy right hand in her left.

“Who’s been teachin’ ye Gàidhlig, Sassenach?” he asked, distracted from imminent sea sickness.

“Murtagh. Just a few words, here and there. I thought it would be useful, so I could speak it to the baby once he or she is born.” As it usually did, her free hand came to rest on the softly rounded swell of her belly when she spoke of her child.

There was silence from the passenger’s seat. She glanced over only to be met by a look of stunning intensity. She felt naked before so much bridled emotion, but she could not break away. The only movement between the two of them was the clenching of a muscle high in his jaw.

“Claire, I…”

Whatever Jamie was about to say, it was interrupted by the shunt of the ferry as it met the shore. They both looked away, and the moment was gone.

The drive to their inn at Dunvegan was shrouded in low-lying clouds. She could just make out the lower slopes of mountains robed in snow. Jamie had once again fallen silent but seemed content to gaze at the passing scenery. She parked carefully on the side of the main road in the tiny village, just two lines of tidy single-story stone cottages, a café and their inn. 

Jamie rose awkwardly from the car and stretched before walking to the boot to gather their shared suitcase. As he did, a pair of women exited a nearby cottage, talking in loud, animated voices. He froze, then spun around.

The women turned right at the pavement and continued walking and chatting. Seeing the tall, handsome red-haired man standing near their path, they both uttered a polite “ _feasgar math_ ” before continuing on their way.

“ _Feasgar math_ ,” he responded belatedly, bowing slightly at the waist out of habit. He turned around, slack-jawed, as the scene came into sharper focus. The signage above the café and inn was in Gaelic. There were horseshoes hung above every door and tartan decorations festooned a nearby fence. Sheep bleated from the fields beyond. Apart from their car and another parked across the street, nothing in view would have been out of place two centuries before.

She stepped onto the pavement beside Jamie and touched his chest.

“You see? The Highland culture did not die. It fled, far to the north and over the sea, but it survived. Here,” she gestured around them. “And here,” pressing her hand against his breastbone. “It takes something tremendously resilient to face that sort of hardship and endure.”

Jamie’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. She could see that he was struggling against tears.

“Come on. Let’s check into our room, and then you can show me around.”

The matronly innkeeper greeted them in a waterfall of Gaelic, to which Jamie answered in kind. He seemed taller suddenly, although perhaps it was the low, timber-beamed ceiling that made him appear so. She heard him say “Claire Fraser, _mo bhean_ ”, while looking at her with pride. 

If the innkeeper thought it strange that the tall Scot and his obviously pregnant English wife were making heart-eyes at each other across her lobby, she did not let on. She led them up a steep stairwell into a hallway so low that Jamie had to duck to avoid banging his head. At one end was a gabled room with a merry fire already lit. It wasn’t large, having room for just an immense four-posted bed, two wooden chairs facing the fire, and a window with views across the slate roofs to the slate-grey sea beyond.

Thanking their hostess and promising to come downstairs later for tea, they stood facing each other from across the room with nervous expressions. It was strange. They had shared the laird’s bed chamber in the days since their wedding, but the idea of being alone in this strange room felt more intimate. There were no routines or distractions to mask the fact that they were now man and wife.

Jamie spent an inordinate amount of time placing their luggage on a low stool, and then stared out the window like he was searching for answers.

“Did you want to take a walk down to the castle?” she suggested timidly.

“Aye,” he agreed eagerly. “Tis a braw day for a ramble.”

She glanced at the fine drizzle that had begun to fall, shrugged and grabbed her Macintosh.

**

Jamie was like a giddy schoolboy upon entering the ancestral seat of Clan MacLeod. The castle itself was not open to visitors, but they had the grounds to themselves. He capered about the battlements, pointing out one feature after another.

“What _eejit_ built those turrets? They’re no’ big enough for a wee lad to enter, ne’er mind a marksman,” he commented, looking up at the main stronghold’s façade.

“I imagine they were added recently, merely for decoration,” she replied, smiling at his outraged tone. “I understand the current Chief Macleod made significant improvements, prior to the war.” Jamie replied with a truly Scottish noise that expressed dubiousness and concession in a single, guttural sound. He spun around, taking in the whole view.

“I always heard it was the bonniest castle in all of Scotland, but I dinna believe it. Now that I see it wi’ my own eyes, weel…” Jamie scuffed his boot on the gritty rock, looking guilty for a moment. “I still prefer Lallybroch, ye ken, but this, this is…” he trailed off, at a loss for words.

Jamie face grew pensive, a deep furrow bisecting his brow.

“What is it?” she asked, stepping closer.

“It’s only… Tormod MacLeod fought on the side of the English at Culloden. I didna ken it at the time, but I read in yer husband’s books that the MacLeod attacked the lands of Jacobite supporters after the Rising, causing much suffering. And yet here their laird abides, twa hundred years on, while the Frasers are nought but names on graves…”

She stepped towards him, wrapping an arm carefully around his broad back.

“Listen to me, James Fraser. You fought bravely for a cause that you believed in, even though you knew the odds were overwhelmingly against you. There is honour in that, and honour is stronger than any castle wall. Also, _you_ are my husband now. I’d thank you to remember that.”

He wrapped an arm around her slim shoulders in return. “Duly noted, Sassenach.”

They stood there in the drizzle, leaning slightly into each other until she interrupted the moment with a vital clarification. 

“Oh, and Jamie? I never said that a laird lived in this castle.”

He leaned back to gaze at her face, eyebrows lowered in confusion.

“Flora MacLeod of MacLeod, twenty-eighth clan chief of the MacLeod since her father passed away in 1935.” She grinned smugly, watching the perplexity transform to amazement on his expressive face. He let forth a burst of laughter.

“ _Dhia_ , I hope she looks fairer in a kilt than Tormod. That man was a hairy beast.”

**

After a light meal of crusty bread, sheep’s milk cheese, dried sausage, and tea for Claire (“why do ye English insist on polluting water wi’ wee leaves, Sassenach?”), they retired to their room to warm themselves in front of the fire.

Jamie was quiet again, pulling at his lip as he stared into the flames. She sensed he was working something through in his mind and gave him room for silence. She allowed the warmth and crackling pop of green logs lull her into a state of suspended awareness.

“I havena been entirely truthful wi’ ye, Sassenach, and tis vexing me greatly,” Jamie began without taking his eyes from the fire. Her stomach dropped, trying to imagine what fact was so awful that even his absolute candor bowed to the demand that it remain unspoken.

“When I asked ye tae be my wife, I told ye it was on account of yer bairn, how t’would be… practical for me tae be its Da, and tae help ye in the running of Lallybroch.”

“Yes. I remember,” she said hesitantly. “It’s a little late for second thoughts, Jamie. The Catholic Church isn’t any fonder of divorce than they were two hundred years ago...”

“ _Ifrinn_. That’s no’ what I mean at all. Christ, Claire, would ye let a man speak for once!” He rose and began pacing the small room in tight circles. His speech hurried to catch the cadence of his steps.

“Tis no’ that the reasons I gave were untrue. Tis just that t’werenna the only ones. No’ even the main one. I asked ye tae be marrit, weel, because I wanted tae be yer husband.”

Running out of words, he stopped near the bed and looked at her. At his apparent inability to continue, she ventured, “You _are_ my husband, Jamie. And I’m very grateful for…”

“No’ a husband in body. Only a husband in name.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “Oh!” She felt her cheeks reddening, even warmer than the glow of the fire. “Are you saying that you would want to be a husband… in body… to me?”

“Aye. Och, look at ye, Sassenach. What man wouldna want tae lie wi’ ye? I’m only mortal.”

She tried to imagine how she looked to Jamie. She was wearing a practical cotton dress, cut a little loose to accommodate her expanding waist. Her cheeks were no doubt flushed from the walk in the rain, the fire, and Jamie’s sudden revelation. She was certain her head was surrounded by a veritable Gorgon of curls.

His confession expelled, Jamie was once again able to meet her eyes, and what she saw there ignited a spark inside her that she was certain had been extinguished forever. She rose gracefully and made her way to where he was standing. In her stocking feet, she had to look up into his face. When she did, she felt electricity prickle her skin.

“Well, it _is_ our honeymoon. I suppose it would be the… traditional thing to do.”

Her hand came to rest on Jamie’s damp linen shirt. Underneath, she could feel his heat and the tremor of muscles held tightly in check. A broad palm cupped her hip.

“I dinna mean this verra minute, Claire. Ye can take yer time tae consider. And wi’ the bairn…”

She ignored him, plucking gently at the fabric. “Your shirt is damp. You’ll catch a chill. You should hang it… by the fire…” she finished as he disposed of the offending clothing in a single move. Her hand now was free to rest against bare, gold-hued flesh. 

She paced a tight circle around his body, stopping behind him where the firelight and shadows emphasized the lacerated surface of his back. Jamie’s shoulders stopped rising and falling as he held his breath, obviously nervous for his scars to be so closely observed. Before he could comment or grow restive, she pressed a careful kiss along his spine, teasing her fingertips over the sensitive skin of his flank as she completed her turn.

“Yer dress is wet as weel, Sassenach. I wouldna wish ye tae fall ill.” His voice, deep normally, was positively cavernous, pulling her pulse low into her belly.

She spun away and lifted her hair from her neck, presenting the zipper. After a moment’s pause, Jamie’s fingers fluttered across her nape.

“What do I do?” he asked in an entirely different tone. Gone was his brash confidence, and she reminded herself anew that he was only twenty-two, five years her junior, and came from a world unaffected by modern notions of love or sex. Not wanting to embarrass him by calling attention to his inexperience, real or perceived, she determined that if Jamie was in want of guidance, he’d ask. As he had just done.

“You pull downwards on the little tab. It’s called a zipper,” she whispered back. A metallic tearing noise, and her dress loosened. Moist breath blew against the tiny hairs of her back, causing them to rise in greeting.

“Verra practical wee fastening, Sassenach,” he muttered as the garment cleaved in two, held up by the precarious slopes of her shoulders.

She turned back to him, and the sparks in his eyes rivalled those in the hearth, hot as ingots with a pulsing blue glow. A ratchety breath stuttered from her lungs.

“Ye dinna have tae do this, _mo bhean ghaoil_. Imma verra patient man. I’ve already bided twa hundred years just tae meet ye.”

Her lips twitched at his beautiful, though not entirely accurate gallantry.

“ _Mo bhean ghaoil_?” she asked as she let first one, then the other shoulder dip. Her dress fell easily to the floor.

“My beautiful wife.” The words withered away to air as the vision of her body unfolded before him. Undulating ribbons of amber and shadow caressed the ivory of her skin, broken by the pale satin of her long line bra and maternity girdle.

“That’s where ye’ve been hiding yer corset,” Jamie muttered, half to himself. They were both drawing hungry lungfuls of breath, the space between them fraught with an oncoming storm.

Very slowly, as though certain she would startle and flee, he raised an outstretched hand until it met her breastbone with the pressure of a feather. She could feel the tremors that shook within him as he dragged each fingertip downward until they gathered in the warm valley between her breasts. The air in the room suddenly felt thick, too heavy to breathe. 

Just as it seemed Jamie’s hand was about to venture below the edge of her undergarments, a memory assaulted her addled senses. Jamie, unknown to her as anything other than a mysterious and gravely injured patient, lay sleeping on his side in her room at Lallybroch. He was still fevered, and she had lowered the sheet to his waist, allowing night air to caress his wounded back. The firelight caught the powerful lines of his shoulder and pectorals, lighting each russet hair that bisected his torso so that he glowed like a lazy sunrise. She had been flooded by a sudden desire to know where that trail of hair led. 

“It’s my turn,” she asserted, reaching for the belt holding up his trousers.

The buckle clattered to the floor without heed as Jamie pulled her roughly upwards into his descending mouth. It was a kiss without introduction or politeness, a tactical assault on her senses launched through the breach of his open mouth. It bore no relation to the few chaste kisses they had thus far shared as man and wife. She had evidently pushed him past the breaking point of his ingrained courteous behaviour.

They parted, stunned speechless, wet mouths agape. He angrily pushed his trousers past his hips and the two collapsed onto the high mattress in an inelegant flop, limbs battling and grasping anywhere for purchase. Her legs fell open instinctively to cradle the long, muscular arc of his body. A cool button nudged her inner thigh. Calloused hands pushed desperately on the unyielding structure of her girdle. A coarse abrasion between her legs. Heat. And then an urgent plunge, both familiar and foreign.

His forehead was pushed into the pillow above her shoulder. Untutored, laboured grunts echoed in her ears.

“Jamie,” she gasped. “Jamie, you’re crushing me.”

He rose immediately onto his elbows, relieving the grinding pressure on her chest, but seemed unable to halt the tidal surge of his body into hers. In a moment, it was moot. He froze, letting loose a shuddering moan that scaled his spine one vertebra at a time. Collapsing sideways onto his back, his face was a portrait of mute astonishment.

She lay beside him, staring at the beamed ceiling, and tried to gather her thoughts. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t invited this very thing. And while the… encounter had been ephemerally brief, she could not deny that she’d enjoyed it. Enjoyed being the recipient of so much passion, no matter how short-lived.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jamie’s ring finger bouncing, tapping a morse code of disquiet against his chest. Awkwardness was a palpable third presence in the bed between them. She wanted to say something to ease his nerves, but words floated away as she tried to wrangle them into coherent sentences.

“Claire, I… please tell me I didna hurt ye. Ye or the bairn.”

His quiet anguish snapped the cord that had been holding her tongue still in her mouth.

“No. Jamie, of course not. I would have said something, if you had.”

“I didna ken it would be sae… fierce,” he confessed.

That certainly answered her earlier question about his prior experience. She couldn’t help feeling a flutter of… something… deep in her belly at the thought.

“It can be. But my body is designed to protect the baby. It will probably become more awkward, as I grow larger. I’ll tell you, if anything doesn’t feel…nice.”

Jamie rose on an elbow, peering down at her. His face was now alight with novice curiosity.

“Ye liked it then? Men gossip about these things, ye ken, and I had heard that most women dinna like it.”

It was too late, and her nerves were too taxed to launch into a conversation about female sexual pleasure and a man’s role in assuring it. She hazarded it was a better lesson to learn by example, in any event. But she didn’t want him to go to sleep disappointed in himself.

Instead she told him the truth.

“I did like it, Jamie. Very much. I’m tired now, but perhaps in the morning…?”

He grinned like a Cheshire cat. Shucking his trousers carelessly, he splayed naked across the bed with his hands tucked behind his head, looking for all the world like a piece of toppled Grecian statuary. It suddenly hurt to breath. The simmering warmth low in her belly threatened to burst into flame, but she was truly exhausted. What she needed most was sleep.

Turning modestly aside, she unhooked her bra and unzipped her girdle before quickly donning a white nightdress. She could feel Jamie’s eyes run over the bared skin of her back. 

“ _Cuir stad air do cheann, Sassenach_ ,” he said softly as she once again settled beside him.

He lay behind her, fingers trailing through her hair and down her arms like spider webs. She fell asleep to his quiet Gaelic mutterings, a lilting lullaby.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> an duine agam - my husband
> 
> feasgar math - good afternoon
> 
> mo bhean - my wife
> 
> mo bhean ghaoil - my beautiful wife
> 
> Cuir stad air do cheann - Rest your head


	23. Chapter 23

The patter of raindrops against the window woke him from a dreamless sleep. Claire was curled on her side, her hair an aurora of darkness against the white pillow. He rose quietly to use the water closet adjacent to their room. They were the inn’s only guests, so he didn’t bother to dress. He tended the fire, then slipped back beneath sheets that now smelled musky and sweet, like a man and a woman stirred together.

He did not want to disturb his wife, so he settled inches behind her, matching the lines of his body to hers. Her nightdress had slipped off one shoulder, and he watched the pale vellum of her skin flutter with her even breaths until he fell back asleep.

**

A tingling sensation in his groin marked his next ascent towards awareness. There was warmth and friction against his cock, beckoning its attention. His hand found purchase on a soft rise of skin, pulling back as he thrust forward. Sensation shot through his body, lifting him to wakefulness.

“Mmmm,” was the only sound from the female form that lay wedged against him. It did not sound like a protest, so he thrust a second time.

“Ye’re naked, Sassenach,” he observed, letting his hand roam first up, then down the horizon of her flank.

“You’re a very hot sleeper. I woke up certain I was in the tropics, not northern Scotland in February.”

“I ask yer pardon. Tho’, I’m no’ sorry.” He nuzzled under her curls, seeking the source of the bewitching odour that seemed to follow her like a cloud.

“You can make it up to me,” she murmured, and without further ado drew his questing hand down between her legs.

At first she guided his fingers, teaching him how to touch her as his tutor had once instructed him to play the mandore. Either Claire was a masterful teacher, or he an apt pupil, because it was not long before she left him to improvise, reaching instead to grasp behind his neck. He closed his eyes, concentrating on the tune she was emitting, knowing instinctively that he was pleasing her as her sighs rose in pitch and frequency. The plump billows of her arse welcomed the rhythmic nudge of his hips.

“Oh, I want you inside of me,” she groaned, and he blasphemed with relief. He tried to roll her onto her back, but she resisted.

“No, like this.” Before he could question the logistics, she raised her upper leg and tilted forward slightly at the waist. He ascended without fanfare into heaven.

The nuance her arousal added to their lovemaking was immediately apparent. While laying together last night had been pleasurable, this morning the experience approximated anarchy. Her sheath was so hot it singed his flesh. It beckoned him forward as his instinct called him to withdraw. With each answering thrust, Claire cried out in pleasure. His fingers, forgotten along with the rest of his body as they joined as one, ventured back to their earlier task. Within seconds his wife drew an enormous gulp of air and then held her breath, her jaw drawn tight and sweat glistening about her pretty face. Before he could summon the wits to ask her pardon for probing too deeply, she dissolved into a series of tremors, accompanied by the sweetest uttering of his name he had ever heard. Clenching his eyes in surrender, he followed her voice into the dark cave of ecstasy.

**

“Sassenach?”

“Yes, my husband,” she purred, sweat slowly drying on the curly hairs of her nape.

“I ken now why the Church considers marriage, and all that goes wi’ it, a sacrament.”

She spun to look at him with a teasing smirk.

“You do, do you?”

“Aye. Only God could take what is base and make it sae verra beautiful.”

Her smirk turned tender. She kissed his lips softly before settling back into his embrace.


	24. Chapter 24

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the record, I don't endorse drinking alcohol during pregnancy. But in the 1940s, there was no stigma or science that advised against moderate drinking during pregnancy.

The sun made a rare appearance on the day before their departure. Besides a few short walks in the village and their mandatory attendance at afternoon tea, they hadn’t left their room in forty-eight hours and her body was beginning to protest.

Convincing Jamie to join her on an outing was proving difficult, but she had an ace in the hole.

“Whisky?” he asked, raising his head from their pillows like a russet-coated setter at the prospect of flushed game.

“Very good whisky, apparently. Mrs. Mackenzie called ahead, and they would be happy to show us the distillery, provided we purchase a bottle or two. I imagine that will be no great hardship.”

He was upright and donning his trousers before she finished speaking.

“Ye’ve been very slothful on this wee journey of yers, Sassenach, and I’ll no’ stand for it. Fresh air and sunshine is wha’ ye need, a’fore ye fall into total dissipation.” He emphasized his mock tirade with a soft tap on her arse, then practically trotted out the door, leaving her to gather her things in haste.

**

It turned out Jamie knew quite a lot about the making of whisky. He and the owner of Talisker Distillery were soon immersed in an animated conversation in Gaelic. Every fourth sentence or so Jamie would volley a hasty translation over his shoulder, but she was content to wander the gangways and between the enormous stills, listening to her husband’s hearty laugh echo off the cool, white walls.

“… the malting floors, tho’ of course tis no’ the season…”

“… feed the rest tae their lucky coos…”

“… could fit ye inside one of these copper stills, Sassenach…”

After several hours and a tasting session that bordered on religious rite, they climbed into their car for the drive back to Dunvegan. Jamie released a contented sigh. The next time she could spare him a glance, he was fast asleep with the sun through the window burnishing his copper curls. His lips were curled gently upward in repose, and her heart gave a painful hiccup. She had a suspicion there was little in this world she would not do to protect that smile.

**

She drove down a gravel lane that wound between bright green pastures dotted with sheep and bisected by dry-stone walls. It ended abruptly at a headland. As the car came to rest, Jamie woke and attempted to stretch his long limbs.

“Where are we, Sassenach?”

“Cape Neist. Grab a bottle of whisky and follow me.”

She carefully picked her way between loose boulders, heading uphill. Jamie caught up easily and offered his arm to steady her. Only a few hundred metres from their car, the stony cliff bent into a series of ledges, like a natural amphitheatre. Claire sat on the highest of these with her feet dangling, and Jamie lowered himself beside her.

The cape before them extended like a crooked jade finger into the heaving sapphire ocean below. At its furthest point, barely visible against the glow of the setting sun, was a white lighthouse. Jamie uncapped the whisky and took a healthy swig before handing her the bottle. Her belly burned with warmth after the strong, surprisingly peppery taste flooded her tongue. She passed the back of her hand across her mouth and handed the bottle back to her husband with a grimace.

“When I was a wee lad,” he began without preamble, “I thought the sun snuffed ‘erself out every night in the sea, and that my Da set ‘er ablaze each morn. My Mam would oft’ say Da was ‘up to catch the sun’, and I reckon I took her at her word.”

She smiled at this charming childhood memory. She wished she had similar recollections of her own parents, but there were only shadowy scenes, too hazy to make out clearly.

“I was but four or five when Da fell ill. Twas the first time I kent him tae be mortal, and it scart me greatly. He lay abed, too sick tae rise. The next morn I woke wi’ the lark, snuck down tae the stables, and saddled my pony. I carried a lit torch and set off in the direction I kent was east. I ne’er got far, for the sun rose wi’out my help, of course.”

“Were you disappointed?” she asked.

“That twas no’ my Da who bade the sun tae rise? Nah. Twas a good lesson. And a braw adventure for a wee warrior.”

She rested her right hand on the swell of her tummy, wondering what memories her child would carry of this man who would serve as its father. That the babe would believe him capable of lighting the sun and other mythological feats was inevitable. Even in a less superstitious time, Jamie inspired that sort of awe.

The sun set below the sea like an immense golden yolk that sank into the horizon until it was nothing but a memory of light. Jamie handed her the bottle and she took one last nip. 

“Twas a bonnie day, Sassenach. Thank ye.”

**

She stood before an antique dressing mirror in her nightgown, trying to brush the salt air from her curls. Jamie’s broad form appeared behind her. He draped something over her head, a milky coolness against her collarbones. Her free hand found a string of fine pearls, their opalescent surfaces glowing in the dim light.

“They’re Scotch pearls. They belonged tae my Mam. Now they belong tae my wife,” Jamie murmured.

“But how…?”

“My sporran. I carried them wi’ me into battle. They’re all I ha’ left of her. Verra precious tae me.” He paused, measuring his words. “As are you, Claire.”

She turned in his embrace and raised her arms about his neck, playing with the curls there. She wasn’t ready to put words to the feelings that rose up inside of her, so she kissed him softly and hoped he could see into her heart.


	25. Chapter 25

Their return to Lallybroch should have marked the beginning of marital bliss for Jamie and Claire. There were certainly moments of pleasure: sharing quiet laughter at the supper table; listening to early spring rains flood the courtyard while sitting in front of the fire; and tentative journeys across the newly claimed territories of their bodies in the enormous laird’s bed each night. Having nothing but the most elementary knowledge of sex prior to his marriage, Jamie was astounded at the array of physical satisfaction that they were discovering together. It was fast becoming something of an obsession.

But for each moment of harmony, there was one of dissonance. Raised as he was in a time of male pre-eminence, he regularly ran afoul of his new wife’s strong opinions and lack of docility. She simply refused to accept his direction on even the most mundane decisions without questioning it first. In one minor example, the topic of lambing season had arisen the previous afternoon.

“Last year Murtagh hired a half dozen boys from the village as shepherds to watch over the ewes,” Claire insisted, hands deep in a ball of bread dough.

“Aye, and ‘alf of those lads are in the trenches now. Rupert kens a man wi’ a fine Collie bitch. If we take a litter o’ pups now, I could ‘ave ‘em ready tae watch o’er the ewes by April.” He dipped a finger into a pot of onion broth and tasted it with trepidation. Claire was many things, but a fine cook was not one of them. Cook was suffering a spell of gout and had been sent home to rest, so his wife was preparing the midday meal for the labourers.

“And then we’d have even more mouths to feed. Really, Jamie. Stop that!” Claire smacked his hand as he tried to grab some chopped carrots from the counter beside her.

“I’m ‘ungry, Sassenach. Squabblin’ wi’ ye makes me peckish. Mayhap ye could offer me somethin’ else tae nibble at,” he murmured as he lifted her curls and set his teeth gently into the cords of her elegant neck.

“Imagine how we’d economize on provisions, if you saw fit to agree with me more often,” Claire retorted, stepping away from his curious mouth. The apples of her cheeks were plumped, and he knew she was struggling not to smile.

“T’would no’ be worth it.” He placed one last sloppy kiss on her jaw and left the kitchen before she could reply.

**

When Claire descended the stairs later that week, Jamie lay in front of the hearth, slowly being smothered by four wiggling four-legged bodies. She looked stern, but couldn’t resist a grin as the imposing, once-ravaged body of her Highland warrior emitted a childish giggle when one pup attacked his chin with an enthusiastic pink tongue.

“I see we are now dog owners,” she commented as she eased her increasingly awkward weight into an armchair.

“Aye. Angus brought ‘em o’er this mornin’.” He pushed the puppies gently to the floor and rose to his feet, brushing stray hairs from his sweater.

“We never agreed to this scheme of yours, you know.”

Jamie was concentrating on not stepping on a paw or tail, but he knew exactly what he’d see if he glanced in Claire’s direction. She had a particular expression that blended mild exasperation and the match-strike flare of defiance. It annoyed and aroused him in equal measures.

“Nae, we did no’. I dinna see why ye’er fightin’ me on this, Sassenach. Lallybroch needs sheep tae survive, an’ sheep need a sheepdog tae protect ‘em.”

“Protect them from what, exactly?”

He let his tone slip towards condescension. “From wolves, Claire.”

She sighed, glancing towards the kitchen to make certain they weren’t overheard.

“There haven’t been wolves in the British Isles since the eighteenth century, Jamie. Last spring, we lost twenty lambs. Two to an owl or eagle, and the rest to the local populace, who are starving and desperate. I hope your dogs are quick with a rifle.”

She left him then, standing in the great hall covered in puppy fur and chagrin.

**

He woke to the sound of sleet hitting the north-facing window. The fire smoldered in its grate and the Claire-shaped indentation on the sheets was cool to the touch. He grabbed his bedrobe and followed the sound of excited yipping down the stairs.

His wife sat near the fire, the sphere of her swollen belly draped in a white linen nightshift. She had spread an old stable blanket in front of the hearth, and it was currently occupied by four puppies and a pork hock that had been destined for tomorrow’s soup.

He stood beside her, letting his fingers tangle through the havoc of her unbound hair, glistening with raindrops.

“I couldn’t leave them in the stables when it’s so cold outside,” she confessed.

He could have insisted that the dogs were in the stables to ensure their protective instincts attached to the animal inhabitants of Lallybroch, not the human ones. Or that Collies were bred with a thick undercoat to withstand Scottish winters. Or still yet that the dogs were not pets, but labourers on the estate. And according to Claire, unwelcome ones at that.

Instead he chuckled as the sharp teeth of the largest pup, a dominant male, accidentally bit into the tail of his smaller sister instead of the soup bone. A sharp growl and bared teeth sent him cowering to the far corner of the blanket.

“Fionnghal may be wee, but she puts Rufus in his place,” he commented.

“You named them?” Claire asked, startled.

“Aye. Rufus is a big ginger, like me, ye ken. The lad wi’ the black mask is Macdui, after the mountain. Fionnghal is a proper lady’s name. Fiona, ye would say, and I’ve been callin’ the roan one Cameron after a cousin on my Da’s side who….”

His wife extended her hand, silently asking for his help to stand. He wasn’t finished talking, but the way she was pulling him back upstairs towards their bedchamber was an opening statement in an ongoing conversation he found infinitely more appealing.


	26. Chapter 26

Claire woke to the disorienting sensation of sea foam tickling up her legs. Or perhaps it was champagne bubbles. A sigh slipped from her lips into the still air of their bedchamber, still fragrant with last night’s lovemaking.

For a couple with precious little experience between them when they married, she and Jamie were proving very adept disciples in the arts of seduction and pleasure. A frantic grappling in the hayloft the previous week had caused Jamie to remark that “the wanting of ye ne’er stops” and she had to agree. Whatever it was between them, it was not diminishing with time. Quite the reverse, actually.

Claire reached a drowsy hand beneath the sheets and into a mess of long curls that somehow did nothing to diminish their owner’s masculinity. With this acknowledgement that she was awake, his mouth latched onto the tender skin of her inner thigh, causing her to gasp and flinch away. A heavy forearm landed low across her hips, signaling in no uncertain terms that her job was lie still and accept the bliss he was offering. Her shoulders flopped to the mattress in easy surrender.

In their limited marital relations, Frank had never performed this act for her. It was only through her exposure to the poetry of D.H. Lawrence that she knew of its existence. She never would have expected Jamie to be such an ardent practitioner, but he was. Oh Lord, he was.

Releasing all self-consciousness, she arched wantonly towards the moist heat of her husband’s breath, hovering just out of reach. His chuckle was deep and lay in the no man’s land between taunting and pained. Deciding to end both of their suffering, she hooked her thigh over his bare shoulder and pulled down. Minutes later, she was crying out to heaven and all mere mortals here on Earth, but especially to the supplicant between her legs who was painting a filigree paradise with his tongue.

**

She hadn’t expected to cherish her husband. The words sounded awful, even in the privacy of her thoughts. Still, she had to admit to herself that Jamie’s estimable qualities (besides being a skilled master of the estate and of increasingly sound body) were the last thing on her mind when she accepted his awkward Hogmanay proposal. She was pregnant and alone, and for once she did not feel equipped to deal with the speed of change that upended her life like Hitler’s Wehrmacht advancing across the Low Countries. Jamie offered his support, a literal key to salvation dangling in front of her, and she snatched at it greedily.

That the man offering this deliverance was honourable was without question. He’d also shown himself to be resolute, honest, selfless and perceptive. While she prided herself on her medical detachment, she hadn’t missed the beautiful copper waves of his hair, his elegant hands, the carnal promise of his broad shoulders and square hips, nor eyes the colour of blueberry dust. She was his nurse first by necessity, but she never stopped being a woman who loved beauty no matter where she found it.

These traits were all admirable, but they did not guarantee her friendship, affection… lust. It was the little things that won her over. How from the beginning, he rose from his chair each time she entered a room, even when the pain it caused him was etched on his handsome, gaunt face. How he would tease her out of her fouler moods, but scowl over the silliest trivialities. How he was easy and deferential with everyone from Murtagh to Laoghaire, the young scullery maid who gazed after him with limpid, adoring eyes. How he inquired after the baby’s health every day, even though her very English child would inherit his very Scottish birthright. How he never failed to make her laugh. Never let his eyes stray from her face as she tried to put words to the maelstrom of worries swirling through her. Never discounted her worth on the basis of her sex.

Their honeymoon to Skye marked the true beginning of their journey as man and wife, but try as she might, she couldn’t place her finger on the moment when she’d started to love him.

**

“When do ye expect this… Sandpiper…”

“Sandringham,” she correct for the second time in as many minutes.

“Somesuch. When do ye expect him tae visit Lallybroch?” Jamie was polishing his leather boots with linseed, so his face was downturned, but she could still make out the disdainful twist to his lips as they discussed the English duke who effectively controlled their destiny as the owners of Lallybroch.

“Last year it was early May. I plan to write to request that he come earlier, given that the babe is due to make its grand debut by the middle of May. But he can’t come too soon, or the wool won’t be ready.”

Jamie stopped polishing and tried to take in the barrage of information Claire had just released with a single breath.

“Sassenach, please tell me ye dinna plan tae write tae an English laird… a duke, no less… who holds the future of Lallybroch in his bejewelled hands, and…. nah. Ne’ermind. Of course ye do.”

“It’s not like that, Jamie. Yes, he’s a duke, but it’s a ceremonial title only these days. He doesn’t have any real power. It’s not as though he’s going to ring up King George and complain about his unruly Highlander tenants.”

He wanted to retort that intercessions of exactly that sort were what brought Lallybroch into the control of the Duke’s ancestor, but he had more pressing matters to address.

“And what do ye mean, the wool willna be ready? What has the duke tae do with our sheering season?”

Giving up on his boots entirely, he rose and joined Claire at the dining table, where she had a week-old newspaper open in front of her.

“Instead of paying the customary fee in cash, in the spring it’s paid in wool. It simplifies things greatly, and the Duke arranges for the transport of the wool to a Yorkshire mill where it’s used to make blankets for the British army. Everyone benefits.”

“Aye, ‘specially the duke,” Jamie commented sardonically.

“What do you mean?”

“Weel, this fee ye pay twa times a year. It’s a hundred pounds, aye?”

“That’s right.”

“And how many bales of wool did ye hand o’er tae the duke last May?”

“Eleven. Jamie, what are you thinking?”

“Wool is rationed a’cause o’ the war, aye? And the army buys it at a fixed rate…” His fingers were tapping madly on the wooden table top, as though he was sending a telegraph message. She knew this tic. It meant he was thinking hard about something important.

“What if… Sassenach, what if we sold the wool ourselves? And paid the duke in sterling when he arrives in May.”

His eyes were blue beacons of excitement, and she hated to snuff them with practical details.

“But Jamie, that would take an enormous amount of work. The sheering would need to be complete by mid-April at the latest. Then you’d need to transport the bales of wool to the nearest mill that buys on behalf of the military – probably in the Lowlands. I don’t even know! And still be back in time for the duke’s visit. It’s a brilliant idea, but…”

“Six ‘undred pounds,” he interrupted.

“What?”

“Six ‘undred pounds, minus the cost of transport. We’d give one hundred tae the duke, an’ still be almost five ‘undred pounds tae the better. Christ, Claire. Think of the good tha’ money would do. For the bairn. And for Lallybroch. We could rebuild the grist mill. Improve the stables. Buy more stock.”

She didn’t disagree that it was a sound plan. While modern conveniences left him floundering, Jamie’s business acumen was above reproach. She hated the idea of him venturing so far away while she stayed behind and incubated a child, however. From the moment he arrived the previous September, they’d never been apart for longer than a day.

The look in his eyes countermanded all her misgivings. He needed to do this. To be a provider to his new family and to find a place for himself in his new world.

She smiled and grabbed his fingers where they still danced over the coarse-grained wood. “It sounds wonderful. Just make sure you’re back in time to greet the new laird or lady, when they arrive.”


	27. Chapter 27

Shearing sheep hadn’t changed much in two hundred years, Jamie thought as he hefted another startled ewe from the shearing pen and pinned her to the ground with a well-placed knee. Murtagh mentioned that some of the larger farms used a mechanical trimmer, but they both preferred the time-honoured method of metal shears, sharp as daggers. Today was their third day. Jamie’s shoulders and arms were throbbing from the constant effort, but they were almost done.

“Tis good fortune we’re having a bonnie spring,” Murtagh commented as they broke for a drink of fresh water from the well.

“Aye. I need tae be on the road wi’in the week, if I’m tae be back a’fore the bairn arrives.”

“I’m surprised the mistress is allowin’ ye tae go at all, wi’ the way she fusses o’er ye like a wee whelp.”

Jamie’s mouth opened and closed, trying to find words to defend his masculine honour against the truth in the old man’s claim. He caught the twitch of Murtagh’s lips through his heavy beard. He cuffed him on the shoulder, laughing at himself.

“She’s lining ‘er nest, ye ken. I reckon she needs me tae practice upon, a’fore the we’un gets here,” he quipped.

“Oh, aye. I’m sure tha’s it.” Murtagh’s sarcasm was so thick, you could serve it on toast.

**

Jamie groaned as he lowered himself into the armchair in their bedchamber, trying to reach down to untie his laces and failing miserably.

“Here, let me,” Claire offered, before realizing she couldn’t bend over the growing bulk of her belly.

“We’re a fine pair. I’m too lame and ye’re too big a’bout the middle.”

“Speak for yourself,” his wife retorted as she carefully lowered herself to the floor. She gently eased off each boot, then proceeded to unbutton and draw his trews down as well. He sighed and cupped her jaw as she began to gently knead the bunched muscles of his thighs.

“Careful, Sassenach. Ye wouldna want tae start somethin’ ne’er of us is in fit condition tae finish,” he warned, feeling himself stir despite his bone-deep exhaustion.

“Wouldn’t I?” Warm eyes gleamed up at him. And then, more gently, “Lean back.”

Unsure what was being asked of him, he complied by letting his back fall against the cushions, his long legs stretched on either side of where Claire knelt on the floor. Having never accustomed himself to the modern notion of underclothing, he was naked from the waist down and hardening quickly below the flimsy hem of his linen top.

Leaning forward so that her moist breath seeped between the buttons of his shirt and over the fine hairs of his belly, Claire began to run her hands languorously up and down his legs, reaching higher with each pass.

“Sassenach,” he warned, and then more urgently, “Claire.”

“Shhhh,” she whispered, before her fingertips brushed against his baws.

“Christ!”

“I’ve never done this before,” she murmured, as though speaking to herself. “Tell me if… well… if it doesn’t feel good.”

And before he could wonder what she meant, she was lifting his shirt, exposing his very emphatic endorsement of whatever she was planning. A tentative moist swipe against the head, where it lay aching against his quivering belly, and then a sensation unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It was the humid welcome of her sex combined with the nimble manipulation of her fine-boned hand, and yet so much more than the sum of those parts. A lightning bolt of sensation shot up his spine, lighting the back of his eyeballs with colourful explosions. A senseless groan burst from his lungs.

Between the exertions of shearing and the elaborate logistics of making love to a woman almost eight months with child, it had been nearly a week since he’d last lain with his wife. A lifetime, in the bountiful feast that marked their newborn marriage. He wasn’t certain it would have made much difference, though. Anything that felt this absurdly good was certain to be over soon, lest it kill him with pleasure.

As it was, it was mere minutes after first feeling her mouth around him before he knew the end was nigh.

“ _A dhia._ _Sassenach._ _Mo nighean donn_. Christ, please, ye must…”

Whatever pleas he was trying to utter were lost to the onrush of his release, racing from his body with the force of a gale, whipping around to slam his head backwards as he groaned in blissful agony.

When he was next able to focus, Claire was carefully unbuttoning his shirt. She extended her hands so that he could help her to her feet. He rose as well, naked and blushing to the tips of his ears. Whatever had just happened, he felt compelled to apologize, if only he could do so without alluding to the actual event.

“Sassenach…” he began.

“Let’s get you washed up, shall we? It’s been a long day.”

He was still new to the art of reading his wife’s unspoken wishes, but this one was plain enough. She did not want to discuss or debate the propriety of what they’d just done, probably a bit shy herself. They would leave it here in the murky shadows of their bedchamber, where it could visit with the other nameless wonders they’d released inside its walls. He followed her docilely from the room.

One modern amenity Jamie had absolutely no qualms about embracing was indoor plumbing, and the associated boon of having a bath whenever a bath was needed or desired. Claire lit thick-trunked tapers in the washroom, formerly a servant’s room adjacent to the laird’s quarters. Bent over the billows of steam that rose from the gushing copper pipes, she reminded him of a painting of a water nymph he’d seen as a boy, all translucent skin and bonnie curls.

He gingerly lifted his legs over the high-backed tub and grimaced as the water seared his skin.

“Too hot?”

“Nah. Jus’ right.” He extended his hand gallantly, as though assisting a lady from her carriage. “Join me?” he offered, before adding, “If ye dinna think it immoral.”

Something about the scene struck them both as a trifle ridiculous, and they snickered.

Claire slipped her nightgown over her shoulders, letting it puddle around her feet, before carefully stepping into the water, holding onto Jamie for balance.

“Now what?” she challenged, eyebrow raised.

“Now I hold onto ye. Ye and the little one.” They sunk together into the steaming water.

She found a resting spot between his legs, forehead tucked under his jaw. Jamie amused himself by scoping up palmfuls of water and letting them loose to roam across the hills and valleys of her torso. Time slowed, as did the vigilant beating of his heart. The water cooled and one by one the tapers guttered, and still they did not move. It was in those peaceful moments, with nothing but the silky stroke of water, the honey whiff of candle wax and the quiet stirrings of a new life beneath the taut skin of her belly, that he realized he loved her. Not in the demure, fitting way that a man was meant to love his wife. But in a pivotal, essential way that was as integral to him as breathing and as endless as the tides.

**

“Ye’ll watch o’er her? Make certain she is no’ rebuildin’ the castle nor tilling the fields by hand, or whate’er stubborn notion settles in her hard heid?”

Murtagh had heard this request, or others very similar, every day for the past fortnight. It spoke to his forbearance that he produced his standard response without a flicker of exasperation.

“Aye, lad. I canna promise ye she willna be stubborn, but I’ll see her safe.”

It was the best he could hope for, and the primary reason Murtagh was staying behind at Lallybroch rather than accompanying Jamie on his journey to Galashiels, much to Claire’s vocal displeasure. She only acquiesced when it was agreed that Rupert would join him as far as Edinburgh, ostensibly to visit relatives. Jamie had an opinion on the true reason for Rupert’s sudden interest in leaving the Highlands for the first time, but he wouldn’t be sharing it with Murtagh.

Fourteen bales of wool were loaded carefully into the estate’s hay wagon. Weighing over a tonne, it would take both Clydesdale plow horses to drag the load over two hundred miles to Galashiels, near the border with England. Rupert would drive the wagon while Jamie rode his favourite horse, Donas. 

The smoothest, most direct route southward was available to them only after nightfall, when motorized traffic was forbidden on the roadways on account of the blackout. That meant they’d do most of their travelling by night, which posed its own challenges. In addition to a small bag of provisions and spare clothing, Jamie was also armed with a dirk and a pistol, though he longed for the familiar heft of his broad sword.

The whole trip should take two fortnights, a little less than a month. The plan was to leave immediately after Easter, so he could be home by late April with time to spare before the Duke of Sandringham’s visit and Claire’s confinement.

In the early morning hours the day before his departure, Jamie crept out of the castle while everyone was still abed and walked up the hill to his parents’ graves. He was pleased to note that the exertion no longer winded him; that he had regained his previous strength. He owed that to Claire; that and so much more. She had given him back his freedom when he thought he was trapped in amber. Offered him a place to stand when every other foothold was lost. She was his redemption. _Saorsa._

He knelt beside the graves, now cleaned of moss with bluebells sprouting between the stones. Resting his forehead against the cool stone, he began to pray. That Claire might be safe. That the bairn be healthy. That his voyage be swift and without peril. And selfishly, that he be the kind of man his parents would be proud of in this strange new world.


	28. Chapter 28

She wasn’t a demonstrative person by nature. The circumstances of Claire’s childhood had seen to that. Practical, pragmatic, emotionally cautious: the nomadic life of an orphan following her scholarly uncle about the globe had shaped her for an adulthood of no-nonsense behaviour.

Which didn’t explain why she was swallowing back tears the Monday evening after Easter. She sat on their bed watching Jamie pack a simple change of clothes and slip a few spare coins in a hidden slit inside his tall leather riding boots. She could blame her pregnancy, but it had been many months since her last hormonal outburst. In truth, she was afraid for Jamie. He was undertaking a difficult twentieth-century journey with only his eighteenth-century wits to guide him. She was going to miss him horribly. A nagging premonition gnawed at her, that he would leave and never come back.

“Dinna fash, Sassenach,” he said, noticing her discomposure. “I may be new tae these times, but I ken a thing or twa about keeping safe on a long journey. An’ Rupert will watch o’er me, leastaways as far as Edin’bra.”

“I know that, Jamie. I just…” She broke off, hands unconsciously cradling her swollen belly, as though comforting the child within her was the best she could hope for.

“What is it, _mo chridhe_? Are ye worrit about the bairn coming early?”

“No. Not really. First babies are often born late. I’m worried about…” she broke off, at a loss to articulate the swirling mix of emotions she was feeling.

Jamie must have intuited her ambivalent state of mind, for he settled next to her and enveloped her hands in his.

Still new to the art of husbanding, he had learned that the best way to induce Claire to talk was to offer her silence to fill. He therefore sat quietly, tangling and untangling their fingers.

“I can’t help but feel…” she began hesitantly, “that once you leave Lallybroch you’ll… oh, I feel stupid saying it…”

“Out wi’ it, Sassenach. If it’s causin’ ye tae fret sae badly that ye didna remind me tae pack spare socks, then it needs to be given voice, aye?”

She grinned ruefully, then tried to collect her scattered thoughts.

“I know you chose to stay here, in this time, rather than return to your own. Given what you know about the aftermath of Culloden, it was a reasonable choice. But Jamie…” He could see how dearly this was costing her. A furrow of worry bisected her brow, and her molten eyes looked haunted. “Jamie, you’re a Highland warrior, and I can’t help but feel that I’ve turned you into some kind of glorified field hand and future babysitter. And that once you leave Lallybroch, you’ll not want to return.”

Having blurted out her fears, Claire’s gaze sheered away from her husband, focusing instead on the patterned wall coverings.

“Claire…” he breathed, stunned by her revelation. “Sassenach, look at me, will ye?”

Their eyes met, and the look he was giving her was so pained that she blinked in shock.

“Have I given ye reason to doubt my commitment to ye and yer bairn?”

“No,” she answered plainly.

“And was it no’ me who asked ye, ripe wi’ another man’s child, to be marrit?” he continued.

“Yes, it was.”

“It’s true that I’m a Highlander, Sassenach, an’ a proud one a’ that. But I was a warrior by necessity, no’ by desire. I fought because to do ought would ha’ been craven, an’ my Da didna raise me tae be a coward. Twas the only way I kent tae protect my family, my clan. Now ye and this bairn are my family, an’ those who serve Lallybroch are my clan. I may no’ ken much about yer science an’ industry, but I can provide for my own, an’ tis my great honour tae do so. And if so doin’, I help ye raise a braw wee Scot tae be laird or lady of this home of my heart, weel, I will one day die knowin’ I was a credit tae the Fraser name. In my time, I would be ded, or just as well. Here, I can do wha’ I was born tae. Now I ask ye, why would I turn from that? Why would I turn from ye?”

It was the most he’d ever spoken about matters neither practical nor routine, and she took the words inside her heart where they lit a spark in the tinder of her newborn love. 

“It does pain me, though, that ye feel I asked ye tae be my bride merely because it was prudent. I havna done my duty as yer husband, if ye dinna ken…”

Jamie stood abruptly and held out his hand. She grasped it gratefully to leverage herself from the bed.

“Follow me, Sassenach. It’s high time tae address my neglect.”

***

Murtagh looked mildly perturbed to have his evening’s routine interrupted, but scarcely more so than usual. A few murmured words in Gaelic from Jamie and he grunted in surprise, appraising Claire’s hastily donned overcoat and pale blotchy skin.

Claire was surprised to find the small croft next to the stables comfortably appointed, its solid wooden furniture decorated with heavy woolen throws and the occasional cushion. An ornate picture frame adorned the mantlepiece, displaying a dour couple posed stiffly in outmoded wedding clothes.

Disappearing through a darkened doorway into the croft’s only other room, Murtagh returned carrying several objects: a long strip of frayed tartan, a two-handled tarnished silver cup, and a short dagger in its sheath. Murtagh placed the items on a low table and exchanged a significant look with Jamie before returning to the adjacent room.

“Claire,” he began, and she could sense the air in the room shift with his pronouncement of her Christian name, muted but sure. “I ken that you and I, weel, we’re still new. But the lady I’ve come to know, she’s… weel, she’s all that I could e’er want in a wife. Canty. Brave. Strong and fierce tae make me heed, but soft and gracious and sae, sae beautiful, she can make the sun shine on a cloudy day. I could travel through the stones across the ages, and no’ find a better companion fer my heart. So I’m asking ye, Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser, will ye do me the ‘onour of becoming my wife? No’ because ye’er wi’ child. No’ because ye need me tae drove yer sheep or mend yer fences or tend yer hearth. I want to be marrit’ to ye because ye’er the only future I wish tae know.”

He was balancing both her hands on his open palms. She fixated on their size; broad and calloused, yet always gentle with her. She smiled and felt him take a deep inward breath.

“Jamie… I… that… but we’re already married!” she blurted.

“Aye. The church ‘as blessed us, and a good thing too. I feared I would be goin’ tae ‘ell fer all the lustful thoughts I had of ye, bonnie wee thing that ye are. Tis a relief tae be back in God’s good graces.”

His impudent smirk released the tension from the room.

“Very funny,” she retorted. “But seriously, Jamie, why are we here? And what is all this…” she gestured towards the table.

“Have ye ne’er heard of handfasting, my Sassenach lass? Tis the proper Scottish way tae be marrit’. When ye’er bound together in the auld way, they say nought can come between ye for a year an’ one day. Sae I’ll ask ye again, Claire, will ye accept tae be my wife?”

“Of course, you ridiculous man. Why else would I be standing in Murtagh’s croft in the dead of night, wearing nothing but an overcoat atop my nightgown and slippers? I swear, James Fraser…”

Any further chastisement was halted by his sudden, emphatic kiss. She nearly lost herself in his mouth before she remembered Murtagh was only a few feet away, waiting for them to finish their quiet conversation. Jamie called him back to the room with a shrill whistle.

Standing before the fire, Murtagh first unsheathed the dagger and drew it roughly across Jamie’s outstretched palm. Claire flinched, but only a few scarlet beads of blood rose from the shallow cut. Understanding what was coming next, she extended her right hand and received a matching slash. Jamie then pressed their bleeding palms together. Murtagh quickly enveloped them in several loops of the tartan sash.

“Is that…?” she asked in wonder.

“Aye, tis a wee strip of my plaid. Murtagh saved me a piece a’fore ye burned the rest, ye heathen,” he joked, calm now that the ceremony was underway and she hadn’t laughed in his face.

“What now?” Claire asked, feeling the slippery warmth of their co-mingled blood against the fine skin of her wrist.

“We repeat our vows. I ken ye dinna understand the Gàidhlig, but would ye consider sayin’ the Fraser oaths? I could translate them for ye and…”

“Jamie,” she interjected. “Of course I want to use your family’s vows. I am a Fraser, after all,” she asserted proudly.

Slowly, using only their free hands, Claire and Jamie each grabbed an end of cloth. Staring at his mouth to capture the nuance of the unfamiliar sounds, Claire slowly repeated after Jamie:

_‘S tu smior de mo_ [ _chnàimh_ ](http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lg-dic/31634.mp3) _, na mo chuislean ‘s tu ‘n_ [ _fhuil_ ](http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lg-dic/11877.mp3)

_Bheir mi dhut-sa mo chorp, gum_ [ _bith_ ](http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lg-dic/28425.mp3) _‘n_ [ _dithis_ ](http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lg-dic/9924.mp3) _mar_ [ _aon_ ](http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lg-dic/2667.mp3)

_Bheir mi dhut-sa_ [ _slàn_ ](http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lg-dic/32239.mp3) _m’_ [ _anam_ ](http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lg-dic/25475.mp3) _, gus an_ [ _crìochnaich_ ](http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lg-dic/31661.mp3) _ar_ [ _saoghal_ ](http://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/lg-dic/18543.mp3)

With each phrase, they clumsily tied a knot above their pressed hands, until the room was silent and their hearts were full. Unsentimental to the last, Murtagh quickly unbound their hands and wiped the blade of his dirk on the plaid. 

Jamie opened a nearby cupboard with apparent familiarity and withdrew a half-empty bottle of whiskey, pouring a generous amount in the double-handled cup. Murtagh growled something unintelligible in Gaelic.

“Tis my wedding day, ye auld coot. Dinna be parsimonious,” Jamie replied easily.

“Tis yer handfasting day, ye muckle-sized eejit, an’ tha’s my only bottle,” Murtagh retorted with no malice.

Claire grinned at their easy banter, happy that Jamie had made a friend in the older man. Besides her, Murtagh was the only person to know Jamie’s secret.

“Here, Sassenach. A’fore Murtagh here drinks it himself.”

Grasping the offered cup, which Jamie informed her was called a quaich, in both hands, she took a hasty sip while looking at him over the bowl. His blue eyes danced in merry amusement. Receiving the quaich, Jamie finished the amber liquid, watching her all the while. Something crackled between them, and both could feel the buzz of it in their veins, stronger than any liquor.

“Weel,” Murtagh interrupted, “if tis all the same wi’ you, I’ll be goin’ tae bed. There’s sheep that require dipping t’morrow. Godspeed tae ye, lad. Dinna forget what I told ye about the roads beyond Edin’bra.”

With a polite goodnight to Claire, Murtagh fled to the other room.

“Well,” Claire began.

“Aye.”

At this rate they’d still be standing in the croft’s living area when Murtagh rose at dawn, staring at one another.

“What did you have me say, exactly?” she asked. 

_“You are the marrow in my bones and the blood in my veins._

_I shall give you my body, that we two might be one._

_I shall give you my whole soul, until our lives shall be done.”_

“Until our lives shall be done?” she asked in a timorous voice.

“Aye, Sassenach. Ye’er stuck wi’ me,” he tried to jest while they slowly made their way across the courtyard and up the stairs of the main house, leading each other through the dark towards home.

“It’s a good thing I love you then,” she confessed.

“And I you, _mo nighean donn_. Come. Let me show ye how much.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mo chridhe - my heart


	29. Chapter 29

The wind blew through the leaves of an enormous willow tree, making them pivot and dance like thousands of silver-green fish. Jamie was resting with his back against the trunk, chewing contemplatively on a length of meadow grass and listening for trouble while Rupert slept. So far, the only sounds were the hum of insects, the babble of a nearby burn, and the grumbling of his stomach. Seven months under Cook’s generous care had accustomed him to regular and hearty meals, and he’d forgotten what it meant to always be hungry. 

Most days on the road he ventured out under the cover of dusk with his bow and managed to bag a rabbit or grouse, but as they moved southwards into more settled farmland he became increasingly cautious, not wanting to be arrested as a poacher. The previous evening they’d had to be content with stale bread and hard cheese washed down with warm ale.

A branch broke nearby. He snatched his pistol from his lap and aimed over his shoulder, nerves singing. Rupert stepped out from behind the tree, rubbing sleep from his eyes with a grubby hand.

“Christ, Rupert! I near blew yer heid off, ye daft oaf. Could ye no’ announce yerself?” Jamie exhaled, pointing the pistol skyward.

“Yer verra crabbit, man. Dae ye miss the mistress sae much ye canna stand the sight of anyone who’s no’ her?” Rupert teased, grabbing the flagon of ale and lowering himself into the dappled shade nearby.

“Bit of a curse and give me peace,” Jamie grumbled, moving away on aching limbs.

“May ye dream of bonnie lassies with round bellies and brown curls, and awake in fairer spirits,” Rupert called out as Jamie made his way to the wagon, where the bales of wool created a fair, if somewhat prickly, mattress.

He groaned as he arranged his long limbs over the wool and pulled his plaid over his shoulders. Thus far they’d been blessed with mild, relatively dry weather, speeding their progress southwards. In a few days’ time they would reach the outskirts of Edinburgh, where Rupert would leave Jamie to manage the rest of the journey alone. He draped his sleeve over his face, trying to block out the persistent sunlight and find a few hours’ rest.

Rupert was right, he was missing Claire. But more than longing for her physical presence, he missed the steady significance of his position by her side. When he was with Claire, he knew his place in the world as certainly as a star in the firmament. The greater the distance between them, the more he felt adrift. He thought of their parting, lips curling wistfully.

“Come back to me, James Fraser,” she’d whispered, holding his skull between firm fingertips.

“Aye, as soon as I can,” he’d replied, and with one last lingering kiss and a soft caress for her swollen midsection, he’d mounted Donas and ridden away without a backwards glance.

Still smiling, he eased into sleep.

***

Rupert was a lad of pointed words and rounded body, but Jamie was sorry to see him go. If nothing else, he was familiar with the ways of modern Scotland and a source of bottomless bawdy humour. It was raining hard as they shook hands at a bridge over the Forth. Neither were inclined to linger.

“God speed to ye, Master Jamie. An’ ‘is blessings on the wee bairn. Lallybroch will finally ‘ave a Scot fer a laird again, aye?”

“My thanks to ye, Rupert. Come ‘ome safe, wher’er the road takes ye.”

Rupert gave him a shrewd look, each of them understanding what wasn’t being said. The young man shifted his haversack higher on his shoulder, turned, and walked away towards the east.

Securing Donas’ reins to the wagon’s railing, Jamie climbed onto the seat and whistled to the plow horses. If he made haste along the verge of secondary roads, he could travel by daylight and be in Galashiels two days hence.

A motorcar approached, much too close to the edge of the tarmac. The angry mechanical bleat of its horn as it flew past startled Donas, who reared and nearly snapped his bridle. Jamie swore prodigiously in Gaelic before jumping down to calm the spooked horse. 

It was going to be a long two days.

***

The closer he got to the border with England, the poorer Jamie’s luck became. First it was the weather, which deteriorated into the windblown icy rain for which Scotland was famous. He was used to being out-of-doors in all manner of clime, but it became difficult to light a fire to get warm or cook a meal. Next, the dark bay gelding threw a shoe and they had to leave the route to find a blacksmith in a nearby village.

By the time he arrived in Galashiels, bedraggled and frozen, it was already April twentieth, three days later than he’d hoped. The wagon rolled to a halt in a cobblestone courtyard surrounded by tidy brick buildings. Jamie eased himself to the ground and mounted the steps to a black door over which was written “Stewart Brothers: Wool Brokers”. Inside was a small office where a number of clerks worked behind wooden desks. He approached the nearest of these and removed his leather cap.

“Good day tae ye, sir. My name is James Fraser of Lallybroch, and I’m ‘ere tae sell wool tae the British Army.”

The thin man lifted his bald head and gave Jamie a thorough head-to-toe glance before snorting dismissively and gesturing vaguely towards a door to his left. Without a word, he went back to his writing.

Knocking on the oaken door, Jamie heard a gruff English voice within say “Enter.”

The office was cluttered and dim. A portly middle-aged man with a wide mustache rose as he entered.

“James Fraser, sir.” He extended his hand.

“Lloyd Stewart, at your service,” the man replied, shaking his hand firmly. “What can I do for you today, Mr. Fraser?” He gestured to a high-backed chair.

During the brief explanation of his journey and his purpose, Mr. Stewart’s expression changed from distracted civility to incredulity.

“Where did you say you were from, Mr. Fraser?”

“Lallybroch, sir. Near Inverness.”

“That’s Captain Randall’s estate, is it not? Do you work for him?”

Jamie drew a deep breath through his nostrils, quelling his urge to be insulted.

“Nay, I am master of the estate. Captain Randall died in the war last fall. His widow is now my wife.”

The merchant raised his bushy eyebrows high, casting a disdainful glance at the younger man’s filthy clothes and unkempt appearance, but saying nothing.

“Ye may… telephone… my wife, Claire Fraser, if yer doubting my claim. Sir.” 

He was bluffing. Lallybroch had yet to install a telephone, mostly because neither he nor Claire could think of anyone they were interested in talking to who wasn’t willing to make the trip to speak in person.

“That won’t be necessary, Mr. Fraser. If you could just validate some simple details for me…” A heavy ledger sat on the corner of the desk, and Mr. Stewart opened it and paged backwards until finding the desired spot. “Now, I see here that last spring our mill purchased some fine raw Cheviot from Lallybroch. If you could simply confirm the number of bales your estate sold us, and who made the delivery, we’ll be right as rain.” 

The man’s subtle sneer indicated he had every expectation Jamie would fail the test, and his next stop would be the local gaol, yet another Highlander imprisoned for theft. Fortunately, the anger and righteousness coursing through the young man’s veins focused his mind, and he clearly remembered his conversation with Claire.

“Twas eleven bales, and brought tae ye by the Duke of Sandringham, who ‘as o’ersight of the estate, as ye likely ken. In the future, t’will be I who brings ye the wool, if ye care tae mark that down in yer wee book, Mr. Stewart. Master James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser of Lallybroch, if ye please.”

After a tense moment in which neither man blinked, Stewart sighed and began to open a heavy iron safe. Five minutes later Jamie strode out of the building, eager to leave and begin his return journey. There was six hundred-and-eleven pounds sterling hidden in the shafts of his boots. The courtyard was empty save for his three horses and the wagon, already emptied of its shipment of wool.


	30. Chapter 30

Claire paused in her knitting as another spasm hardened the surface of her distended belly. She rubbed herself gently, whispering, “Hush, _mo leanaban_. Be still. _Mathair_ is trying to prepare for your arrival.”

It was May first, four weeks after Jamie’s departure, and he still wasn’t home. Rupert had written from Edinburgh, so she knew the two had parted outside Stirling ten days after their departure from Lallybroch, and all had been well up until then. The letter also disclosed, to absolutely no-one’s surprise except Murtagh, that the big lad was enlisting in the army. The overseer had taken the news as well as could be expected. There was a great deal of banging and cursing from the direction of the stables for the remainder of the afternoon.

It had been raining steadily for nigh on a week, which allowed Claire to blame her husband’s slow return on the weather. Even empty, the horses would need to work doubly hard to pull the wagon through the mud and Jamie would stop often to spare them.

There was very little for her to do but sit and wait, which did not suit her personality. The mindless repetition of knitting soothed her. Mrs. Fitz procured several skeins of the softest wool and she set about preparing her child’s layette. The fleece was cream with hints of the softest shade of grey, like woodsmoke on a breezy day.

The months of her pregnancy had been so tumultuous, she hadn’t spent much time pondering the sex of the baby she carried. But if she was forced to guess, she would have said a boy. A little laird for their tiny kingdom, whom her husband could teach to be canty and brave and strong. Jamie was certain it was a girl, “a fierce wee sprite, like her Mam”.

Either way, the babe was preparing to be born; these false labour pains were a sure sign. She wanted Jamie to be home, yesterday. Biting her lip to stave off tears, she continued to knit. Over. Under. Loop. Repeat.

**

She sat up with a gasp, awaking from a dream of being underwater. As the roar of her heartbeat subsided, the everyday noises of Lallybroch at night reached her ears. A steady rain beat against the casement windows and the sheets were drenched in sweat.

No. No, the sheets were not drenched in sweat. Lifting the blanket, she observed the liquid divot between her legs, flecked with small clots of blood.

It would appear her child would be awaiting the arrival of neither the duke nor Jamie to make its grand entrance.

***

Hoofbeats sounded from the courtyard and Mrs. Fitz bustled from the bedchamber, her skirts held aloft from around her ample hips. Claire had been labouring for fourteen hours with only marginal progress, and they had sent to the village for the midwife. Her pale cheeks rose and sunk like bellows as another pain gripped her like an iron claw, her breath tapering off to a groan. Sweat twisted her curls against her temples like black vines. She was so afraid and so lonely for Jamie, she knew she must be dying.

Mrs. Fitz re-entered the room, looking still more concerned than when she left. She opened her mouth to speak, but no words emerged.

“Is it the midwife?” Claire whispered, throat parched. “Is she not coming?”

“Nay, milady. That is, aye, the midwife is still coming. Twas no’ she that we heard…”

“Well, who was it, then?”

The conversation halted as another contraction drew a hiss from between clamped teeth. Mrs. Fitz fussed with a stack of clean linens and retucked the sheets that had been loosened by Claire’s thrashing.

“Mrs. Fitz? Who rode into the courtyard at a gallop at this hour of night, if it wasn’t the midwife?” she asked, growing distressed by the housekeeper’s obvious procrastination.

“Nae’one, milady.”

“Oh for Christ’s…” she broke off mid-curse, throwing her head back and howling.

“Milady, ye must calm yerself and save yer energy. Fer the bairn,” the housekeeper pleaded.

“I’ll calm down when you tell me who is in our courtyard,” she ground out.

There was a long, tense moment as the two women stared at each other. Mrs. Fitz eventually looked away.

“Twas Donas,” she muttered.

“Jamie!? Jamie is home?” She lifted her body from the pillows as though she meant to stand and run down the stairs, despite being in advanced labour. Mrs. Fitz ran to the bed and pushed her gently back down, shaking her head sadly.

“Ach, lass. Nae Master Fraser. Jus’ Donas.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mo leanaban - my babe
> 
> Mathair - Mother


	31. Chapter 31

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> IMPORTANT - if you want to end this part of the arc on a happy note, you should stop reading after this chapter. You will be able to read the last five chapters of this story and all of the second story (once I write it) as the second arc, and it will still make sense. I don't like giving away the direction of the story, but I also don't want readers to get to the end of Chapter 37 and then come after me with pitchforks. You've been warned.

The horses were exhausted from dragging the empty wagon uphill through the thick Highland mud. Just past Loch Insh, the lead gelding went lame. Pulling into the lee of a huge Scotch Pine, Jamie dismounted to check the animal. His near hock was swollen and warm to the touch, but the horse could still bear its weight; just not the weight of the wagon and its driver. Blowing raindrops off the tip of his nose, Jamie set to work unharnessing the team. It was twenty miles to Lallybroch. At this point, he was willing to crawl if need be.

Donas was a fractious animal at the best of times. He coiled and twisted like a four-legged snake between Jamie’s thighs while he tried to lead the two draft horses. To make matters worse, the wind was blowing through the abutting forest like the tines of a giant comb. Without warning, a nearby tree branch broke with a snap and fell with a heavy thud. All three horses spooked. Donas reared, and Jamie found himself lying in the mud holding onto Lonnie and Clyde by the reins while his mount’s black hindquarters galloped into the distance.

***

Highlands roads had been infamous in his time for brigands and reivers. The last thing Jamie needed was to have the profits of his toil stolen not ten miles from home, so when he heard approaching hoofbeats, he quickly hid with the horses in a dense thicket by the edge of the road.

A rider on a stout grey cantered by, his face occluded in the darkness. Jamie waited a few minutes. When the sound of retreating hoofbeats was nothing but the hammering of blood in his ears, he led the geldings back onto the road and turned again northward.

***

His legs ached, his feet were blistered from walking all night in his riding boots, and he was chilled to the marrow. It was only another five miles to Lallybroch, but Jamie couldn’t take another step. He was so tired, he didn’t hear the approaching hoofbeats until they were practically upon him. By then, it was too late to hide.

“ _Beannachdan, neach-siubhail_ ,” a gruff, familiar voice called out.

It was Murtagh, astride the same sweating grey cob Jamie had hidden from only two hours before. Upon finding the Lallybroch wagon abandoned by the side of the road, the old caretaker had doubled back in the hopes of finding Jamie along the road.

“It gave us a mighty fright when Donas came back wi’out ye, lad,” Murtagh explained.

“Aye. I must rest a spell, but I’ll make my apologies tae Claire when she wakes t’morrow.”

“There willna be rest fer ye t’night, _mo ghille_. She needs ye. Take my horse, and I’ll follow as I can wi’ the geldings.”

The look on Murtagh’s face flushed ice water into his veins, numbing his pain. Without another word, Jamie leapt onto the cob and galloped towards Lallybroch.

***

Dawn was just beginning to gild the sky when the exhausted horse and rider clattered into the courtyard. Not even bothering to wait for a stable boy to emerge for his mount, Jamie swung his leg over the pommel and leapt to the ground. He nearly collapsed to his knees before struggling upright and tripping up the stairs into the house.

“Claire!” he yelled as he ran upstairs, eyes bloodshot and wide.

The house was silent as the grave. He tasted the bitter acid of terror on the back of his tongue.

“Claire!” he tried again as he flung open the door to the laird’s bedchamber. The bed sat empty, stripped of its sheets. A bloodstain marred the middle of the snow-white mattress. Air flew from his lungs as though he’d been punched.

He ran back into the hall, planning on finding Mrs. Fitz and shaking her until she explained where his wife had gone. His wife and child. Gone.

About to descend the stone steps, a faint noise brought him instead to the guest room he had occupied before his marriage. Standing before the east-facing window and backlit by a brilliant sunrise was the most beautiful thing he had seen in his life.

Claire’s back was to the door, draped in the Fraser plaid she’d gifted him for Hogmanay. She was swaying slightly from side to side, speaking so softly he had to strain to hear.

“… the rising sun always makes me think of your Da, little angel. He’ll have to tell you the story himself, when he returns. Dear god, may he come home to us safely.”

He must have sighed or made some involuntary noise, for his wife whirled around, a bundle of white cloth held to her chest.

“Jamie!” she shouted in amazement, startling a cry from the bundle.

“Sassenach,” he gulped, eyes jumping between her weary face and the source of the increasingly loud squalls that filled the room.

“You’re home! Oh, thank heavens.” She took in his appearance: exhausted, filthy and limping slowly across the expanse of floor that separated them. “Are you alright?”

“Me?” he asked, incredulous. “Aye, Sassenach. I’ll do.” He was close enough now that he could make out purple, wrinkled skin, split by the toothless slash that was surprisingly small for the amount of sound it emitted. 

“Who’s this, then?” he asked tenderly, reaching out a shaking hand to rest first on his wife’s shoulder, then the squirming bundle.

“Jamie, I’d like you to meet… our daughter.”

“Daugh-ter?” his voice catching on the word.

“Yes,” she smiled at his thunderstruck face peering down at their child, who was quieting under the heat of his palm. “She’s both impatient and stubborn, much like her Da, but she’s… well, she’s perfect, isn’t she?”

“Aye. Aye, she is. And ye, Sassenach? Are ye alright?” He kissed her tenderly, careful not to crush the babe between them.

“I am. There’s the three of us now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beannachdan, neach-siubhail - Greetings, traveler
> 
> mo ghille - my boy


	32. Chapter 32

Eight days after her arduous birth and Jamie’s dramatic return, Brianna Julia Fraser Randall was baptized at the village kirk in front of dozens of tenants and workers. Lallybroch once again had a blood-born Randall in residence. The threat of their livelihoods passing into the hands of an English duke had passed. If the babe’s hearty squalls while the priest dipped her into the baptismal font were any indicator, she would grow up to be as braw and outspoken as her mother. The entire estate exhaled a collective sigh of relief.

Jamie walked about with a perpetual grin on his face, boasting to anyone who held still long enough about the exploits of his wee daughter and the ferocious strength of his beautiful wife. Claire had laboured for twenty hours and ended up giving birth with only Mrs. Fitz to assist her, as the midwife had been called away to another county. 

The rain finally stopped, the lambing season was upon them, and all was right with their tiny corner of the world. 

Claire rose from the shallow edges of maternal sleep to tuneless humming. Jamie stood in the moonglow streaming through the unshuttered window, swaying slowly from side to side like a mighty tree in a breeze. Brianna lay nestled in the crook of his elbow, her swaddled feet barely reaching his wrist. Her heart glowed, both at her husband’s butchered lullaby and the devotion he plainly felt for their newborn daughter.

She’d never doubted Jamie would make an excellent father: his familial instincts were one of the first things she’d admired about him. But to see her husband so obviously besotted by Brianna, a child he had adopted by proxy and welcomed without obligation, spoke volumes about the man.

“Is she hungry?” she asked, interrupting a quiet conversation in Gaelic.

“Nah. The lass and I were just having a wee chat. Tho’ she’s bound to be peckish soon. I ne’er imagined a bairn sae small could eat sae often.” Leaving the window, Jamie came to rest on the corner of the bed.

“Well, her belly is very small and fills up easily. Plus, she’s growing faster than any adolescent boy, and I’m sure you remember what that was like.” Claire drew her finger down the precious dip in Brianna’s nose, causing the babe to go momentarily cross-eyed. 

So far her eyes were the slate blue common to most babies, but Claire thought she could detect the beginnings of Frank’s dark brown peeking through. What little hair she had was brown as well, with a tendency to curl at the nape when damp.

“Aye, Mrs. Crook couldna keep her larder stocked, fer I was always sneakin’ in tae pilfer what’er she made. I ate a batch of oatcakes entire once, and got a hiding fer my trouble,” Jamie grinned.

“Serves you right,” Claire pronounced, taking Brianna from his arms as she began to fuss. She lowered her nightdress off her shoulder and bared one swollen breast, offering the nipple to her daughter’s questing lips.

“Christ, Sassenach,” Jamie breathed. She glanced his way and noted how he was staring openly at her bosom.

“Speaking of adolescent boys,” she teased.

Jamie grinned abashedly. “Tis nae that… weel, tis nae jus' that, anyway. Tis a miracle, tae watch ye nourish our wee lady wi’ yer body. I dinna think I’ll e’er tire of seeing it.” 

She curled her palm over the sharp ridge of his jawbone, prickly with the short beard he’d grown while on the road. He nuzzled back affectionately.

“I may tire of doing it soon, if she keeps waking to nurse every few hours,” Claire admitted, yawning and switching a half-awake Brianna to her other breast, tickling her cheek to get her to latch on.

“I would carry yer burdens fer ye if I could, Sassenach,” Jamie said, easing down on the bed beside his two favourite lasses with a sigh.

“I know you would, love.”

***

The warmth of the late spring sun painted Lallybroch with a pastel glow as Claire made her way across the pasture. Brianna was secured snugly against her chest by a shawl. She heard Jamie before she caught sight of him, his deep Scottish burr punctuated by shrill whistles. It brought her a measure of peace she’d never expected to find, especially in the midst of wartime. She felt guilty, knowing that the world was still suffering under a tremendous burden. Yet she and Jamie had each borne their share of suffering. It was a time for joy.

Cresting a small hill, a bucolic scene unfolded before her. Murtagh and Jamie were tending a flock of about fifty ewes and their lambs, driving them from the lower lambing pasture to the summer grazing higher up the slope. One of the Collie pups, now almost fully grown, circled the flock in a low crouch, responding to Jamie and Murtagh’s verbal commands and whistles.

“Aye, Rufus. Good lad! _Thoir an seo iad_ ,” Jamie called as the dog nipped at the heels of a wayward ewe, causing her to bolt back into the centre of the flock, her lamb lolloping behind her.

Claire leaned against the wooden fence, careful not to squish Brianna who was fast asleep in her sling. So far her presence had gone unremarked. Both men wore tall boots over close-fitting trousers, loose linen tunics and tweed caps placed slightly askew. They bantered back and forth in Gaelic as they worked. While she could not understand the flow of words, Jamie was obviously teasing Murtagh, judging by his wicked grin. His hearty laugh rang out over the bleating and birds singing from their springtime songbook, and she smiled to her toes. This was what James Fraser was made for. 

The last of the sheep were driven through the gate, and both men turned homeward. Murtagh saw her first, making some comment to Jamie that she couldn’t hear. Her husband lifted his cap and mopped sweat from his brow using his sleeve before raising his hand to wave at her. 

In a heartbeat each one of her senses heightened, like an arrow released by an unwitting marksman. The sweat that glinted on the skin exposed by the open neck of his tunic. The sun burnishing his auburn hair copper and gold. The serene blue of his eyes echoed by the cloudless sky. Every long sinewy inch of his body, as familiar to her now as her own. She loved him, and she wanted him more than she had ever wanted anything in her whole life.

“Hallo, Sassenach,” he greeted as he approached.

“Hi,” she answered dumbly.

“How is our wee Bree?” As he leaned forward to peer into the sling at their sleeping daughter, she caught his scent, ripe and tart like the fertile earth beneath their feet. 

“She’s… uh… she’s fine. She’s asleep.”

Jamie peered up at her, an eyebrow raised in concern.

“Is e’rything a’right, Claire? Ye seem… distracted,” he observed, lifting a hand to push a loose curl behind her ear.

“I’m… no… I’m well. Fine, that is. I’m just…” Her words halted on a gasp as Jamie ran his thumb over the plump bow of her lower lip.

“Tis a trial tae resist yer charms when ye’re looking at me as ye are, Sassenach. Best ye stop, a’fore I lose hold altogether.”

“How am I looking at you?” she whispered, the tip of her tongue coming out to taste the tang of salt his thumb left behind. 

“Like ye want tae take me behind yon shed and deflower me a second time.”

“Jamie!”

Her husband chuckled at her mock offense. He was about to respond, no doubt with another witty gibe, when their daughter began to squirm and mew.

“I need to feed Brianna,” she apologized, wishing they could stand in the warm air and flirt all day.

“Aye, ye do. An’ Murtagh’ll be hollerin’ fer me any minute. I’ll bide, Sassenach. Jus’…”

“What?” she asked when he hesitated.

“It sounds daft, but jus’… dinna forget me, aye?”

She understood exactly what he meant. In the two weeks since her birth, Brianna had become their whole lives. It would be easy to lose sight of their young marriage and newborn love. She’d had those same fears herself, watching Jamie lavish the baby with doting praise. But no matter what life might bring them, the invisible tethers that tied her heart to his were still there.

“Never,” she promised. And she meant it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoir an seo iad - Bring them here


	33. Chapter 33

The Duke of Sandringham arrived unannounced on the fifteenth of May. Claire was in the kailyard hanging washing to dry, Brianna asleep at her feet in a reed basket. The sound of excited barking brought her around the house, loose hair held back by a kerchief and the baby basket balanced on her hip.

“Your grace,” she stammered upon seeing the duke emerge from his Humber Pullman. “ _Macdui, Fionnghal, an seo!_ ” she called to the dogs, who were sniffing the Englishman’s footwear with interest.

“Lady Randall,” the duke intoned, “how marvelous to see you again. And looking so… pastoral,” he continued, taking in her appearance with a finely arched brow.

“I’m afraid you’ve caught me unprepared, your grace. The message announcing your arrival must have been waylaid.” Brianna began to stir, emitting a tiny gurgle.

“Don’t worry yourself, my dear. I’m afraid my schedule was a bit… up in the air, as they say. Now who do we have here?” he asked, peering into the basket.

“This is my daughter, Brianna, your grace. Frank’s daughter,” she added, for clarity.

“Oh, I was terribly sorry to hear of your husband’s death, my dear. How dreadful, for a young bride such as yourself. But at least you have your beautiful child to remember him by. What a fitting testament to the strength of your love.”

Claire felt as though she was being skillfully maneuvered into confessing some unknown crime. She wished desperately for Jamie’s steadying presence by her side. At that moment Rufus’ arrival in the courtyard announced his approach.

“Sassenach!” her husband cried upon catching sight of her. “Yer ‘usband is a fair genius and we shall ‘ave milled flour fer ye tae make atrocious cakes wi’ a’fore long. Twas a wee log stuck beneath the waterwheel. Dinna ask me to sire Bree’s brother or sister on ye t’day, tho’. I near froze my baws off diving in the millpond…”

Jamie entered the courtyard from behind the stables, naked to the waist and looking like nothing less than a Viking berserker. He halted upon noticing the unfamiliar man. Claire shot him an exasperated look.

“Jamie, we have company. May I present the Duke of Sandringham. Your grace, this is James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser. My husband.”

***

To Jamie’s credit, he dispensed with the formalities of greeting an English noble without an ounce of indignity at his appearance. The duke’s eyes didn’t quite know where to settle and darted between the Scot’s broad chest, soaking trousers, and the way he held Claire’s hand laced with his own.

With uncharacteristic muteness, the duke followed the pair into the main house. Making their excuses, Jamie and Claire fled to their bedchamber to change clothes and hand Brianna over to Laoghaire’s care.

“Jamie…” Claire began, not sure what she wanted to say.

“Dinna fash, Sassenach. All will be well. Jus’ stick tae our plan, aye?”

“Was greeting the duke dressed as peasants and discussing your testicles part of our plan? Because I don’t recall that bit.”

Jamie grinned and gave her a quick kiss on the nose before they descended downstairs.

***

Lunch was a surprisingly congenial affair, considering the inauspicious start. Despite his ambiguous sincerity, the duke was a masterful social animal. He had clearly taken the moments Claire and Jamie had been upstairs to regain his aplomb.

The conversation focused mostly on Brianna’s arrival and the pleasant spring weather.

“And of course, there is the wonderful news of our successes in North Africa. Those krauts are on the run with their tails between their legs, eh, Fraser?” the duke said as Claire filled his goblet with port for the third time.

“Aye, your grace.”

“Forgive my impertinence, Mister Fraser, but I could not help noticing your back when you were in _deshabille_ earlier. Were you injured… in combat?”

Claire sucked in a disapproving breath.

“It happened while I was a soldier, aye,” Jamie answered quietly.

“Jamie doesn’t like to speak about the war, your grace. Certainly you understand,” Claire interrupted.

“Of course, of course. I do apologize, Mister Fraser. How fortunate you are to have such a considerate wife to nurse you back to such an admirable state of health.”

Jamie merely nodded in agreement, and the conversation turned to the farm and the successful lambing season.

Eventually the meal was over. Jamie rose and stiffly presented the duke with a thick parchment envelope.

“Ye’ll find one ‘undred pounds sterling in there, yer grace. I ken ye’er accustomed tae receiving payment in kind e’ry spring, but we were able tae bring our wool tae market ourselves this year, and plan tae do so henceforth.”

A dark cloud passed over the duke’s face, but no sooner had Jamie braced for the oncoming dispute when the Englishman smiled with forced politeness.

“How extraordinary. Your new husband is a very canny businessman, Lady Randall. You’re very fortunate to have him home with you, assisting so capably in the running of the estate.”

“My wife’s name is Mistress Fraser, if ye please, yer grace,” Jamie interrupted with a barely concealed snarl.

“Yes. Of course. Silly me. Lady Randall is but an innocent child.” There was a long moment of awkward silence.

Wanting to see the duke on his way before Jamie’s limited forbearance reached its breaking point, Claire herded the two men towards the courtyard.

“Thank you, as always, my dear for your hospitality. The future of Lallybroch now lies entirely with you and your beautiful daughter,” the duke intoned, purposefully excluding Jamie.

“I feel quite up to the challenge, your grace, with the help of those who care for me,” Claire responded, standing next to the open car door.

“I haven’t the slightest doubt. Now, before I take my leave, Mister Fraser I would dearly like a minute of your time. A private chat between gentlemen, if you will.” Jamie grunted in a vaguely affirmative fashion.

Claire looked on helplessly as her husband and the Duke walked towards the nearest pasture. No good could come from this.

***

“You’re a very lucky man, Mister Fraser,” the duke began as soon as they were out of earshot.

“Aye. I am. But luck is no use if ye are no’ worthy of it, yer grace.”

“Well said, young man. I forget, where did you mention you saw combat?”

“I didna say,” Jamie replied succinctly.

“Yesssss, well, it’s interesting. Very little transpires in this part of Scotland without my knowledge. I’d heard of your expeditious marriage to Captain Randall’s widow, of course. And your mysterious appearance last fall, seemingly from out of nowhere, with those horrifying wounds… well, it’s the stuff of Highland legend, isn’t it? You have such a distinctive name, Mister Fraser. I looked for it in the army records of discharged soldiers. Do you know what I found?”

The little round man, usually so outwardly affable, was now menacing Jamie like a cornered weasel.

“I dinna ken,” Jamie answered, shifting his weight from one foot to another.

“It’s as though you’re a ghost. No enlistment records. No discharge records. No army medical records. No sign of James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser anywhere prior to your marriage to Lady Randall, not five months after she was widowed. Extraordinary, don’t you find?”

Jamie kept silent, trying not to fall into the duke’s carefully set trap.

“A very fortunate ghost, with a beautiful young wife and a step-daughter set to inherit Lallybroch when she’s grown. Nothing to do but fix waterwheels and mend fences all day. While British soldiers give their very lives in service to their country.”

“Now, listen ‘ere,” Jamie jumped in, unable to listen to another insult. “I ‘ave served my country. I am no’ afraid tae die tae protect what I love.”

“I won’t forget that you’ve said so, Mister Fraser. Because the time may come when you’ll be asked to do it again. I hope for the sake of Claire and her daughter that you are as valiant as you claim.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> an seo! - heel!


	34. Chapter 34

The summer of 1943 was golden and blessed in their tiny domain. It rained only enough to keep Claire’s vegetable and herb garden thriving, and the air that blew through the open windows of their bedchamber each night was fragrant and sweet.

Brianna was a constant delight, smiling her gummy smile and babbling up a storm. As she began to sleep for longer stretches, Claire and Jamie reconnected as lovers, first tentatively and then with increasing voracity.

News of the war reached them with its edges blunted, like an argument heard through a wall. The Allies were on the offensive on the continent, and rumours spread that victory would be declared before long.

One day the couple were walking through the village when a commotion reached their ears. Coming around the corner they met an army messenger hastening away, a look of awkward relief on his face. The front door of the Mackenzie cottage stood open, an unholy wailing coming from within.

“Donella, what is it?” Claire inquired. She wrapped her arms around the large woman who stood crying in the doorway, trying to lead her towards the small parlor. Jamie bent to recover a letter that had fallen to the floor. He read its brief typed message with a grim expression.

“Tis my boy, milady! My dear sweet lad. Ach. May those filthy jerries rot in ‘ell, the lot of ‘em!”

Claire looked up at Jamie, who shook his head sadly in response.

They stayed with Mrs. Mackenzie until her husband could be fetched from his bakery, leaving the cottage silently as the two tearfully mourned the death of their only son in Sicily, an island they had never heard of until today.

***

Upon arriving back at Lallybroch, Jamie withdrew to the north pasture. Claire could just make out his figure clearing granite rocks until well past sundown. He was quiet at the supper table, rousing only when she presented Brianna’s forehead for him to kiss goodnight.

“ _Aislingean milis, mo ghràidh_ ,” he whispered into her downy curls.

They met again in the middle of their bed, the violet glow of a Highland summer night painting bruises across their skin.

“What is it, my love?” she whispered as she rested her chin on the muscular hillock of his bare chest. 

He shook his head, unable or unwilling to give voice to whatever had consumed his previous contentment. He pulled her mouth upwards into his own. Their lips and tongues clashed, each fighting for dominance. Finally he used his weight to flip Claire to her back, pulling her head back roughly by her curls and biting down her neck, his whiskers scouring the fair skin.

“Jamie…” she gasped, writhing in pleasure.

“Ye’er mine, _mo nighean donn_ ,” he growled, nipping the scalloped surface of her ribs. She moaned in response, trying to force him between her legs.

“Mine. Now and forever,” he continued. “I must hear ye say it.”

“Yours,” she groaned in agonized pleasure as he continued to torment her.

“Forever?” He was holding down her arms with one hand, grasping himself at the root with the other.

“Always…” she hissed as he drove home and began a punishing rhythm that set them both aflame in minutes. 

Hours later, Claire rolled to her side and found Jamie’s side of the bed empty. When she pried them open, her eyes found his shadowed form standing naked by the window, staring out into starlit night.

***

Jamie started to make a nightly ritual of listening to the BBC broadcast from the war. He paced about the room as the announcer listed southern Italian hill towns that had been captured by the Allies, the successes and failures of bombing raids over Germany, and the flimsy intelligence that trickled in from the eastern front. Afterwards he sat in morose silence, spinning his dirk in endless circles between his hands.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Claire said after several such nights.

“Aye?” Jamie had a peculiar glint in his eye that she wasn’t familiar with.

“Yes, and I won’t stand for it! You want to charge into the fray and play the hero. Live up to your cursed Viking pedigree. And do you know what will happen? They will send you back to me in a box. Just another dead soldier like all the rest. You can’t win this war, James Fraser.”

She was surprised by the fountainhead of fury that welled up inside of her. She’d guessed Jamie’s secret days ago, but hadn’t realized just how badly the anger had festered.

He leapt to his feet. “Dinna talk to me as tho’ I’m some callow lad who’s ne’er seen a battle, Claire!” 

“Not these battles! Never a war on this scale!” she yelled in response.

“And so wha’? I’m supposed to cower behind yer skirts while others do their duty?” He matched her tone, insult for insult, hurt for hurt.

“You’re supposed to bloody well live, Jamie! For Christ’s sake, how much more do you expect us both to lose?!” 

Claire crumpled onto the sofa, her head held between her hands and shoulders shaking with sobs. There was a long silence in which she thought he might have left the room before the cushion next to her sank with his weight.

“Dinna cry, _mo gràidh,”_ he said softly, pulling her into his chest.

“I can’t do it, Jamie. I can’t lose you too.”

“Ye shan’t lose me, Sassenach. I reside in yer soul, as ye do in mine.” His hand stroked her head and down her arm, over and over.

“Promise me. Promise me you won’t enlist.” She was staring at him now, bloodshot eyes beseeching.

“I canna be ought but the man I am, Claire…”

“Promise me…” she demanded, knowing she was asking the impossible.

“I promise I willna go looking tae go tae war,” he said finally, resigned.

“I can’t live in a world without you, Jamie. Please don’t ask me to.”

They stayed in each other’s arms, neither speaking, both afraid the day was coming when his promise would be put to the test.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aislingean milis, mo ghràidh - Sweet dreams, my darling
> 
> mo gràidh - my love


	35. Chapter 35

Jamie tiptoed a moral tightrope through the remaining months of summer and into the fall. He turned the puzzle over and over in his mind, searching in vain for an answer that forfeited neither his conscience nor his promise to Claire. Stymied, he turned to Murtagh.

“Ye ‘ave no’ been conscripted, _mo ghille_. Why go borrowin’ trouble?”

They were in the stables, Murtagh forking straw from the loft and Jamie distributing it amongst the stalls.

“Were ye called tae fight alongside the auld laird in the Great War, then?” Jamie replied.

“Ye ken fine well I was no’. Twas different.”

“Different ‘ow?”

“Weel, I didna ‘ave a young wife and bairn, fer one thing,” Murtagh explained, coming down the ladder.

“All the more reason tae fight. What kind of man am I, Murtagh, if I dinna protect my family? A disgrace tae the Fraser name, is wha’.” Jamie tossed his pitchfork to the ground and faced the older man.

“I ken ye ‘ave ‘onour and courage in yer bones, lad. No-one is doubting that. But tis no’ a war that ‘onour nor courage shall win. Do ye think a sten gun spares the righteous? Five ‘undred rounds a minute; it’ll make mincemeat of yer thick head. Do ye think a bomb dropped from o’er the clouds willna rip ye tae pieces jus’ ‘cause ye come from a time when a man’s allegiance was all he ‘ad?”

“Ye sound like Claire,” Jamie scoffed, hands on his hips.

“She’s a smart lass. Maybe ye should consider listenin’ tae one of us.”

***

Claire was trying to feed Brianna her pablum in her highchair when he entered the kitchen. While still unable to sit upright without wobbling like a top, the baby was turning her head from side to side, lips pressed together in a stubborn line against the approaching spoon. Despite his worries, Jamie couldn’t help smiling at their daughter’s spirit. 

“I’m beginning to think she’ll never eat solid food. She’ll be six years old and still suckling at my breast,” his wife sighed in frustration.

“Tha’ willna happen. Sooner or later, her wee brother or sister will come along and demand she give up ‘er place.” Jamie pulled up another chair and gently removed the spoon and bowl from Claire’s hands.

He could feel her eyes on him. He concentrated on his task, mixing the pablum and loading the small baby spoon. They hadn’t discussed having another child, but they had certainly put forth a great deal of effort towards that end. With Brianna starting to wean, the likelihood of Claire getting with child would increase. He wasn’t certain which reaction startled him more: the blind terror of impregnating his wife during wartime, or the heedless desire to do the very same thing.

“Now _mo nighean_ , open yer mouth fer yer Da,” he said, holding out the spoon to Brianna. She broke into a gummy smile broken by two tiny teeth and eagerly accepted the pablum, some of which ran back down her chin. Jamie used his sleeve to wipe it up before offering a second spoonful with the same result. Claire snorted beside him, leaning her head against his shoulder.

“You’re showing off. I think she prefers you to me.”

“Tis no’ true, Sassenach and ye ken it. Yer a wonderful Mam to our wee lady here.”

He continued feeding their daughter until the bowl was empty, enjoying a few minutes of tranquility with the two most precious people on this earth.

“Do you think… would you like that? To have a child with me?” Claire whispered into his bicep.

He swallowed the tight knot that rose in his throat and choked out a gruff “Aye.”

“Me too,” she confessed without raising her head.

***

The letter that halted all his circular deliberations arrived in November. Even before he opened it, he knew what it would contain. He would burn in hell, because his first reaction was relief. The decision was no longer his to make.

Mister James Alexander Malcolm Mackenzie Fraser was called to report to Fort George on the first of December 1943 in order to take up a position of Private, First Class in His Majesty’s Black Watch infantry unit.

“How did they even know where to find you?” Claire cried when he showed her the letter.

“Ye stood next tae me as I swore tae my existence at the Registrar in Edin’bra, Sassenach,” he replied.

“So that we could be married! I had no notion I was signing your death warrant, otherwise I wouldn’t have been quite so insistent.”

“ _Mo nighean donn_ , ye must no’ think that way,” he tried to calm Claire’s rising hysteria.

“Two hundred thousand dead British soldiers. That’s one out of every five men deployed. Men who already knew how to fire a rifle, drive a vehicle, operate a godforsaken radio! You’re cannon fodder, Jamie!”

Their raised voices scared Brianna, who began to cry. Claire lifted her from the floor where she’d been playing with some blocks Murtagh had given her as a baptismal gift.

“Hush, my love,” she crooned, wiping the tears that flowed down her daughter’s plump cheeks.

She turned to give Jamie a nasty look that telegraphed “do you see what you’ve done?”, but he had already left the room.

***

It was late that night when Jamie crept into bed. Claire was lying on her side facing away from him, but he knew she wasn’t asleep.

“Do you know what today is?” she asked without preamble. He could tell by the rasp in her voice that she had been crying.

He searched his memory but could find no significance to the date.

“It was a year ago today you told me who you really were, about your trip through the stones. I remember thinking I’d never met a man who had lost so much, and yet was still so unflinchingly brave.”

He grunted, remembering the cold sweat that had flooded him as he knelt beside his parents’ graves and prepared to tell Claire his secret.

“That day, I told you… do you remember? I said that nothing you said or could say would ever change my opinion of who you truly were.”

“Aye. I remember. I remember every kind word ye’ve said to me, Claire.”

“It wasn’t kindness. It was the truth. You accepted me as I was: pregnant with another man’s child, English, outspoken, a horrendous cook…” she broke off with a watery laugh, and he found there wasn’t enough room between his ribs for his heart and his stomach to co-exist. “I’ve been lying here thinking,” she continued, “that if I was truly the woman you deserved, I would accept this foolhardy valour in you as well. But I’m not that woman, Jamie.”

“Sassenach…” he interrupted, heartbroken at both her words and the desolate tone of her voice.

“There is another way,” she said, rolling over so that he could make out her face for the first time. She was pale and grim. He could measure the toll the past hours had taken through the lines on her face. He drew his finger slowly from the corner of her lips, over her chin and down the column of her aristocratic neck. There would never be a more beautiful woman.

“You can go back through the stones,” she continued, and it took several moments for him to even grasp her meaning.

“Sassenach… Claire…”

“Just until the war is over. Just until it’s safe to come back,” she insisted, her voice growing more emphatic now that the idea was floating in the air between them.

“I canna do that, Claire.”

“Why not?” she challenged.

“Why no’? I’m a wanted man in my time, or had ye forgotten? I would ‘ave tae hide, disguise myself… An’ thas’ assuming I even make it back! We dinna ken tis safe tae pass through again, or whether I’d end up where I began. A’sides all that, running away would make me a traitor in these times. Did ye think of that? If I ignore this summons, I’ll be a criminal fer the rest of my days nae matter where I bide.”

Her face crumpled as he spoke, and he felt certain he’d convinced her with his logic. 

“You took up arms _against_ the English crown once. That made you a traitor as well. I guess now we know what you love more: Scotland or your wife.” 

She flopped angrily to her back to stare at the ceiling, while he lay beside her trying to remember how to breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mo ghille - my boy
> 
> mo nighean - my lass


	36. Chapter 36

Jamie and Claire didn’t cross paths for the whole day. He was gone from their bed when she woke. She finally ventured to the stables when he did not appear at the lunch table. She found only Murtagh repairing an old wagon wheel. She swallowed her pride and asked after her husband.

Murtagh grunted and pointed his chin towards the north slope where the Fraser graveyard was located. She turned to leave when the old man spoke.

“Leave ‘im be, mistress. He’ll come tae ye once he’s ready.”

“And do you know what he’s decided?” she asked, wondering if Jamie had spoken to Murtagh about their conversation the previous night.

“I dinna ken what path the lad will choose, but I hope ye understand, mistress, that either choice will ransom ‘is soul.”

With those words weighing on her heart, she returned to the house and tried to busy her mind with menial tasks for the remainder of the day.

It was dark when she finally heard his familiar tread in the entry. He walked into the great hall where she was sitting with Brianna on her lap, reading aloud from The Wind in the Willows.

“Jamie, I…” she began.

“Fine,” he said at the same moment. “I’ll do it.” 

“Really?” she gasped. “Oh, thank Christ.”

“I dinna think ye ken what ye’ve asked of me, Claire. I hope ye ne’er do.”

He sounded beaten, and she’d never been less happy to be getting her way. He left the room without another word.

***

The preparations for Jamie’s departure were necessarily swift. He was expected at Fort George in four days. Claire flew about the estate, trying to plan for every contingency. Each item he brought with him could betray no trace of modernity, which stymied her desire to send him through the stones with an automatic pistol, a vial of penicillin and details of every anti-Jacobite initiative of the 1740s.

Jamie spent his time in the library, poring over folios and maps. He refused to discuss his precise plans for survival with her. She knew he would want to locate his remaining family – his sister, brother-in-law, nephew and niece – and to see to their safety as well as his own. 

There was a gulf opening up between them that was wider than any temporal distance the stones could impose. She had asked him to spare his life for her sake, and he hated her for it.

***

Claire couldn’t keep still. She was constantly checking and rechecking Jamie’s pack, adding more bannocks and fruit leather, wrapping his spare clothing in oil cloth to keep it dry.

The day before their departure, Jamie traveled by horse to Aviemore. He returned in the afternoon having purchased a small purse of antique coins found by a farmer while digging post holes. They all dated from before Culloden.

“You remember what I told you about keeping any wounds clean and dry, right?” she chattered as Jamie sat nearby, staring out the window into the rainy night.

“Ach, Claire, ye’ve packed enough clean linen to bandage me from head to foot. I’ll do, lass. Sit down.”

She perched three feet away from him but jumped to her feet again with her next thought.

“Did I tell you I knit you a warmer sweater? Mrs. Fitz is just sewing the pieces together for me. It may be cold, wintertime. I should go get…”

“Claire. Sassenach. Sit. Down,” he commanded, and she sunk to the sofa again.

“I hate this,” she whispered.

“I know.” Jamie reached a hand across the cushion that separated them, and she clasped it with her own.

“It will be alright, Claire. I promise ye. And when I return, we…”

Jamie was interrupted by Murtagh’s gruff cough.

“I came to wish ye well on yer journey, _mo ghille_ ,” the overseer said from his position near the doorway.

“ _Tapadh leat, seann duine_ ,“ Jamie replied. “Dinna tell me ye’ve been making me clothes as well,” he teased, gesturing to the bolt of cloth Murtagh held in his hands. “I’ll be returnin’ tae my time a veritable dandy!”

“Haud yer wheesht, lad,” Murtagh retorted, stepping further into the room and lowering the suspiciously heavy-looking bundle to the table. Unwrapping it reverently, he disclosed a beautiful steel broadsword, basket hilted and gleaming in the firelight. Jamie let out an appreciative whistle and stood to admire it more closely.

“Twas given tae me by my father. I ‘ave no notion of its provenance. Tis been in the Fitzgibbons clan fer generations.”

“Tis Spanish steel,” Jamie commented, captivated by the beautiful weapon. “Ye see this tiny mark, beneath the pommel?” Then, catching himself, he stepped away from the table. “I canna accept such a gift, Murtagh. Tis too precious tae part wi’.”

“Ach, dinna be daft. What am I tae do wi’ a _claidheamh beag_? Chase after the coos wi’ it? I ne’er had a son, but yer as like my own kin. Ye’el have need of such a thing where ye’re goin’.”

Claire watched with tears in her eyes as Jamie’s jaw clenched in rhythm to his repeated swallowing. He took a step towards Murtagh, hesitated, then launched himself at the older man, embracing him with all his might. Murtagh stood with his arms at his sides for a few awkward moments before reaching up to slap Jamie on his broad shoulders twice.

“Ach, go’on wi’ ye,” he growled, stepping back from the embrace.

“Thank ye, Murtagh. Truly.”

“Godspeed, _mo ghille_ ,” Murtagh said, and then left without another word.

***

“When Frank shipped out, I was angry,” Claire said to the darkness. It was past midnight, and she and Jamie were lying side by side in bed, each silently counting down the hours before he must leave.

“I wasn’t scared for him. Not really. I was upset that he was going to war and leaving me behind in Scotland. When I received the news that he’d died, I wept. I mourned the loss of his life, certainly, but I think what upset me the most were the burdens I had to carry for him once he was gone. That makes me a horrible person, no doubt.”

“Ye canna blame yerself for how ye felt, Sassenach,” Jamie murmured from his side of the bed.

“All I know is this,” she continued. “If you went to war, I would be terrified. Blind with panic every hour that you were gone. And if something happened to you…” she choked on her words, unable to go on.

“Hush,” he tried to quiet her.

“No. You need to hear this. If something happened to you, I would find the nearest merchant vessel, sail to the continent, and kill those fucking Nazis myself.”

A strangled laugh escaped her husband’s chest. “Weel, I always did say ye were a fierce wee thing, Sassenach” he admitted.

“What I’m saying, James Fraser, is I cannot live in a world without you in it. And given the choice between knowing that you’re alive in another century or sending you off to die in this one, I chose your life over our happiness. Even if it means that you hate me for it.”

“I could ne’er hate you, _mo nighean donn_. Ye’re my soul’s echo. I will love ye until time comes to an end.”

They met in the no man’s land between their bodies, lips finding their counterpart without the aid of sight. She could taste the salt of tears on his skin. Soon kisses weren’t enough, and they began to paw roughly at each other’s clothing, trying to get closer still. Jamie had a torn thumbnail, and it scratched angrily at her skin, causing her to convulse with pleasure.

“Please,” she panted. “Please. Love me, please.”

They writhed like wrestlers on sheets dampened by their sweat. Naked at last, Claire rose above his body like a Valkyrie, trying to position herself over his cock.

“Wait!” he exclaimed at the last moment. “Yer courses,” he added, as though that explained him calling a sudden halt to what they both so desperately needed.

“My what?” she asked, confused by lust.

“Ye jus’ finished yer courses. I dinna want to get ye wi’ child, Claire. No’ when…”

“Not when you don’t know if you’ll be coming back,” she finished, falling to the mattress in defeat. “Like Frank.”

They lay there, trying to catch their breath. Jamie slowly bent over her, his long hair tickling her cheeks. He pressed a gentle kiss to her swollen lips as a hand strayed between her legs.

“Jamie…” she warned.

“Like this, _mo gràidh_ ,” he offered, parting her gently with a long finger. “Let me serve ye, this one last time a’fore I go.”

She bit her lower lip, trying in vain not to cry out.

“Ye shall forever be mine,” he declared as she shattered to pieces like a crystal vase.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mo ghille - my boy
> 
> Tapadh leat, seann duine - Thank you, old man
> 
> claidheamh beag - a Scottish broadsword
> 
> mo gràidh - my love


	37. Chapter 37

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to those who stuck it out to the bitter end. As mentioned, this story is the first of a two-part arc. I have the second story plotted out in my head, but won't make any promises as to how quickly it gets written. In the meantime, thank you very much for reading!

Mercifully, Claire left him to say goodbye to Brianna alone. He held his daughter in his arms as she cooed and batted her tiny palms against his beard.

“Heed yer Da, _mo nighean_ , and be a good lass fer yer Mam,” he said, trying unsuccessfully to master his emotions.

“ _Bidh gaol agam ort gu bràth. Na dìochuimhnich mi_ ,” he whispered in her ear.

Claire ignored his red-rimmed eyes as he joined her in the courtyard. The field hands and a few villagers were assembled to see their laird off to war. Mrs. Fitz and Cook stood on the stairs, dabbing their cheeks with hankies. He had never been comfortable with ceremony or pomp, so he merely shook each man’s hand before getting into the passenger seat next to Claire, who stared resolutely forward as she made her way down the drive and turned north.

It was overcast and a steady wind blew across the moor. Claire left the main road and pulled into an abandoned lane that lay at the foot of Craig na Dunn. She put the car in park but didn’t turn off the engine. They sat in silence, listening to the hum of the motor.

“Christmas Eve, two years’ hence,” she reiterated for the hundredth time.

“Aye,” he agreed, looking up the slope to where the stones were hidden by a copse of trees.

“I don’t think… I can’t go up there with you. I just…” she stopped.

“I ken, Sassenach. I dinna think I could bear it if ye did,” he replied.

Several more minutes passed before she finally spoke again.

“Well, this is silly. We can’t put it off forever.” She leapt from the car and gathered his sack and sword from the boot where she’d carefully stored it under cover of darkness. As far as everyone at Lallybroch was concerned, Jamie was off to war. If the Conscription department saw fit to visit the estate to inquire to his whereabouts, there would be a dozen witnesses to the fact that he’d bid his tenants and family goodbye and driven off towards Fort George.

Jamie stood beside her in the withered grass, holding her cold hand in his own.

“I want ye to know, Claire…” He got no further, as she placed her fingers over his lips.

“Don’t,” she croaked. “No goodbyes.” He kissed her fingers and nodded.

“Until the next time we shall meet then, _mo nighean donn_ …”

Claire fumbled in the pocket of her overcoat, pulling out a roughly forged silver band. Grasping his left hand, she slipped it onto his ring finger.

“Was’ this then?” he asked, peering closely at the simple yet beautiful design.

“I had the blacksmith melt down your kilt pin. The one you used to escape. I thought… that if it saved you once…”

He raised her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles once, like a knight in a fairy tale.

“Thank ye, Sassenach. I’ll wear it, always,” he promised.

“Alright then,” she blustered. “Off you go. Don’t you dare not come back to me, James Fraser. Or I’ll travel through those stones and fetch you myself.”

With a half grin, he nodded and began to climb the short, steep ascent. He forced himself not to look back until he reached the edge of the trees that crowned the summit. Allowing himself one final glance, he watched her car disappear from view before plunging forward into the gloom.

***

The stones were as he remembered, tall and threatening against the steel-grey sky. As he approached he heard their familiar hum, vibrating like a hundred instruments tuning as one. Where before he had been powerless to resist their call, today they pushed him away like two magnets with opposing poles.

He took this as a sign that his choice was the right one. Finding an ancient oak tree with a hollow between its gnarled roots, he carefully hid Murtagh’s sword and his travelling sack, covering them both with dried leaves and branches.

Without a backwards glance, he started to descend the far side of the hill to rejoin the main road, marching north towards Fort George.

 _Tha toil Dhè air a dhèanamh_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mo nighean - my lass
> 
> Bidh gaol agam ort gu bràth. Na dìochuimhnich mi. - I will always love you. Don't forget me.
> 
> Tha toil Dhè air a dhèanamh. - God's will be done.


End file.
